Friday, February 10, 2006

"Entirely uninterested in fancy features like stored procedures, triggers, and the like" : David Heinemeier Hansson

So David Heinemeier Hansson, the inventor of Rails was recently interviewed by Lenz Grimmer of MySQL AB.

I was very happy to see the interview on PlanetMySQL as just the other day I was talking about RubyOnRails on this blog and was surprised to see that no one posted a comment about Rails. Actually, I got only one comment about PHP which honestly made me very sad.

I am also very glad to hear about DHH's future plans of continuing to support Rails but not like MySQL AB supports MySQL (Not that I don't like MySQL's way).

On the other hand, being a DBA, I was kinda disappointed at David's following remarks:

"I love MySQL because its fast and easy for the simple stuff. I’m entirely uninterested in fancy features like stored procedures, triggers, and the like. So I hope nothing is being sacrificed while the 5.0 series chases these.

My advice would be to focus on enabling that simple feature set to go higher. Make clustering and other scaling techniques even easier. Perhaps baking in support for managing partitioned data sets."

I think stored procedures, triggers and events are very needed in MySQL. Hope David is not worried about competition from MySQL :)

MySQL gurus, I would love to hear your opinions on the above statement.

Frank

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Features are nice and can be useful but raw speed and lack of bugs matters a lot. Some speed decrease can be seen seen going from 4.0 to 4.1 because of the extra work of handling multibyte character sets. Sometimes that cost can be overcome by added performance features, sometimes not.

Features are also esssential for those porting from other database servers so I don't see any prospect of MySQL slowing development on 5.n to help people convert.

How many extra servers do you need is the question to consider when you get a slowdown. For most people, none is the answer because they aren't really stressing their servers. If you have 400 servers that matters a bit more. :)

James Day

Markus Popp said...

I found enough to write about this to create a blog article on its own ;-) - see here: http://db4free.blogspot.com/2006/02/entirely-uninterested-in-fancy.html

Anonymous said...

As someone who is considering moving a large installation away from MS SQL to MySQL, I can say with absolute certainty that it would not be happening if MySQL did not have these features. Anytime complexity increases in anything but a simple environment, Stored Procs and triggers become absolutely essential to the development process.

If David is ok with MySQL being considered the little kid on the block, then he's right, but enterprises will not consider MySQL for anything serious if it does not have the features he criticizes.