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MySQL, Consider it Seriously
September 23, 2016

MySQL, Consider it Seriously

Lyn Liberty | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with MySQL

We built a robust content management system with mysql with a web front end, a MAMP stack. Our design approach including writing computation-heavy parts of the application in procedures which worked very well. We used triggers to track changes and states of data points that moved between different languages and therefore had to be treated differently. We got a lot of mileage out of an open source platform. Overall, it performed very well.
  • Shifting computations to the server-side and leveraging the power of the database engine made our application fast.
  • Our mysql databases were stable.
  • They were easy to manage in terms of user privileges, backups, etc.
  • At the time we built the CMS, we banned subqueries because they were so slow, however, their performance has been improved since then.
  • Our team was never able to get a proper service contract funded. I think we would have benefited from more access to the mysql engineers from time to time. The overhead of the MAMP stack was negligible. Our salaries were the only real cost. I'd say we were a bargain!
I've used Oracle. MySQL is not a fully featured but it's like its little brother. For an open source product, it's a serious database. It's evolved over the years and continues to improve.
It really depends on type of project, of course. We had a problem as a team finding contractors to hire who were both familiar with mysql and more advanced database features and data modeling. Since it's open source and free to use, it suffers from being the go-to for very rudimentary application. In addition, I've seen some very idiosyncratic programming with mysql from developers obviously unaware of best practices in ETL and data modeling. With a properly skilled development team, however, you can really get a lot of value from mysql.