Hi,

I was an Oracle DBA from 7.3 to 9i, and actually got my 9i certification.  I guess I'm in the minority :) 

In general, at least back then, there was an "R1" rule.  You never ran 10G.  You waited for 10G R1, or if you did run 10G, you only used 9i R2 features because they were solid in 10G.  Regressions were uncommon, but using a mix of new features in a new release could sometimes be a nightmare. 

I became a MySQL DBA because I was using ORACLE TEXT + PARTITIONING + Parallel Query on 9iR2 and I would get a DDL deadlock during TRUNCATE PARTITION.  All of the local indexes on all of the  partitions on the 2TB table (this was 10 years ago and that was big data) were invalidated when this would happen!  Trust me, you don't want your search engine to start doing full table scans of a 2TB table in the middle of the night. :)

Oracle told us to upgrade to 10G as they would not fix 9iR2 and my boss refused because we were paying over 500K per year for 9iR2 support and licenses (it was still under active support)  to be told basically to shove off and just upgrade instead of them supporting us properly. 

Thus began my long march to MySQL, having to manually recode all the features I loved about Oracle,  like intra-query parallelism (shard-query), and materialized views (flexviews).   Finally, now with my tools and MySQL 5.6 we can approach 8/9i feature parity :)  [except we dont' have pl/sql, user defined data types, etc..]

So... nothing is perfect.  And I don't expect it to be.  But I do want bugs that have been open for years and are rather trivial to fix to actually get fixed in new releases.  And I want new features to be well tested TOGETHER.  It seems that the new features are tested in isolation, and may work well that way, but I think more black box testing is necessary instead of relying on the community to do that.

--Justin


On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 9:50 AM, MARK CALLAGHAN <mdcallag@gmail.com> wrote:
If Yoshi's slides are only to serve as fodder in the MariaDB v MySQL marketing battle then I hope they don't get published. 

MySQL 5.6 has bugs, new features in 5.6 have even more bugs. That isn't a surprise, that is an opportunity for people like me and companies like Percona to help make it better. The surprise to me is that early 5.6 releases are in good shape despite so many changes. 

Negative opinions about releases should be earned. If you think 5.6.X is bad, you had better spent some time using it to figure that out. I hope this side of the world doesn't become full of unearned opinions. Too much marketing like that will limit your community.

Given Justin's list of problems he encountered, it looks like he earned his opinion.


On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 1:20 AM, Colin Charles <byte@mariadb.com> wrote:
Mark,

On 26 Sep 2013, at 16:06, MARK CALLAGHAN <mdcallag@gmail.com> wrote:

> Why do you claim it wasn't GA ready? By MySQL standards I think it was very stable early on. You can decide whether I am more or less biased than other people making comments on this. Given that I have no experience with something like Oracle, I am not sure that early Oracle releases for a new major version are any better.
>

I am merely inferring from Justin's comments, which you can also read[1]. In fact, from your own team at Facebook:
- DROP/ALTER table was slow. Fast implementation in 5.5 didn't make it to 5.6, fixed
- GTID implementation in production is hard to do in 5.6 (I understand facebook-5.6 has some solution around this possibly)
- http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=70265
- http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=68220 (maybe not a bug, but a behavioural oddity)
- https://www.facebook.com/notes/mysql-at-facebook/eq_range_index_dive_limit-system-variable-in-mysql-56/10151533648715933 (maybe even you wrote this? One can't tell from the FB note)

There's a longer list in Yoshinori's excellent talk on MySQL 5.6 at Facebook. I hope those slides make it online somewhere/sometime

And given that I also have no experience with something like Oracle, I have no idea if their new releases are any better either or take a similar amount of time to stabalize

I see you have commented on the blog post, I look forward to the discussion there as well.

cheers,
-colin

[1] - What maybe is not clear overall are the reasons as to why some features in MariaDB are being re-written. I see some good documentation in an example like https://mariadb.atlassian.net/browse/MDEV-452 but this is not always the case as to why there is reasoning for a decision (some are probably in commit logs, some are probably discussed on IRC, etc.)


--
Colin Charles, Chief Evangelist
MariaDB | t: +6-012-204-3201 | Skype: colincharles




--
Mark Callaghan
mdcallag@gmail.com

_______________________________________________
Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~maria-discuss
Post to     : maria-discuss@lists.launchpad.net
Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~maria-discuss
More help   : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp