A comparison of MySQL And Oracle

Jeremy Haubrich

Importance of choosing the right database

High cost for an enterprise system Databases can hold the keys to the castle Databases can give companies a competitive advantage

Direct comparison isnt fair

Oracle and MySQL are built for different markets Oracle is designed for the enterprise customer with a big enough budget and more complex business needs MySQL is a lower cost database that is most commonly used for database driven web sites and non mission critical applications Features that look identical in a brochure may be implemented very differently (ex. row level locking)

Cost

Oracle

$36,000 per processor for Enterprise Edition + optional $8,000 for support and software updates $5,000 per processor for Standard Edition + optional $1,100 for support and software updates

MySQL

Free to download $500 for a commercial license + optional $1,500$62,000 for different levels of support

Oracle Features

Oracle Management Server

Central administration, monitoring, and tuning of multiple databases Schedule and share database tasks with other admins Allows you to create a change plan and see the effects of your changes before actually implementing them Also shows any changes that cannot be applied

Oracle Change Manager

Administrative Alerts

Oracle will contact the admin by email or pager when an error condition occurs Can be scheduled to reduce false positives

More Oracle Features

Capacity Planning

Tracks usage patterns to help admins plan for upgrades Feedback on CPU, disk and query performance

Query Optimizer

Oracle chooses the most efficient way to execute a SQL statement Analyzes tables and indexes to minimize the cost of the transaction

MySQL Features

Easy to get started with Many free GUI management tools like PHPMyAdmin Speed is emphasized over lesser used features Uses very little overhead

MySQL uses just under 1MB of RAM on my laptop My Oracle 9i installation uses 128MB while idle

More MySQL Features

Beginning to support advanced features

Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views in the next version (5) Select statements with sub-queries were introduced in the current version (4) Transactional tables

Cascading updates and deletes Available through the third-party InnoDB storage engine

Migragtion from MySQL to Oracle

As your company grows Oracle may be a better fit Migration tools are available (Oracle Migration Kit) Companies may use both Oracle and MySQL

Differences in syntax

http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/ Not all databases use the same SQL syntax Example: Returning the first 5 rows of a query

MySQL

Select columns FROM tablename ORDER BY key ASC LIMIT 5;

Oracle

Select * FROM ( SELECT columns FROM tablename ORDER BY key ASC ) WHERE ROWNUM <= 5;

Timestamps

MySQL
Create a field of type TIMESTAMP and enter an invalid date. In this case February 29 2003. mysql> insert into tester values ('2003-02-29 00:05:00'); Query OK, 1 row affected (0.07 sec) Notice that MySQL doesn't complain about the date. Checking to see what MySQL enters you see that it just changed the date to the first day in March. mysql> select * from tester; +----------------+ | time | +----------------+ | 20030301000500 | +----------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Timestamps

Oracle
This will work, INSERT INTO tablename (columnname) VALUES (TIMESTAMP'2003-02-28 00:05:00') while this will fail: INSERT INTO tablename (columnname) VALUES (TIMESTAMP'2003-02-29 00:05:00')

Concatenation

SQL Standard symbol for concat is || MySQL uses || as the OR operator

Uses concat(string1, string2) More familiar to programmers Breaks the standard Ex. string1 || string2

Oracle uses || for concat

Which is better?

MySQL

For non mission-critical environments Great for database enabled websites Attractive price point Rock solid dependability, reliability, and features Steep learning curve and expensive Designed with the enterprise in mind

Oracle