Question: “If you were a business owner and you had to make a company wide decision about which database your company is going to use which one would you choose?” I’m sure there would be a wide range of answers if we took a poll from our users. Maybe the following article will help you decide.
Free or not free, that is the question
Have you wondered which database you should use for your web site? Should you spend the money for Oracle or give your hard earned money to Microsoft? For years web site owners have asked me which database they should use to power their web site. I always give them the same answer, MySQL.
But how does it scale?
After I make my recommendation the next question the typical business owner ask is: “How does it scale?”
Scalability is really a buzz word that salesmen use to make their product sound better. The truth is just about any product out there will scale if you throw enough money and resources at it (with enough memory and hard drive space anything in life is possible). That really isn’t the point though. The question should really be: “Can I run this on less hardware and still get the job done?”. The point is it should take less hardware and resources to get the job done as the load increases. That is scalability in a nutshell.
Database shoot-out
As it turns out in the database shoot-out over on Eweek.Com they benchmark several of the top databases including Oracle, MySQL, Sybase, and SQL Server. The article mentions MySQL and how it and Oracle9i were the top winners. These are some interesting numbers and I think a great testimony about the power of MySQL. I won’t even go into a price comparison as there is none. Give the article a read and feel free to post any comments.