mySQL 5.0 alpha available for download
12 01 2004ActionScript Hero has just reported some great news, a developer edition of mySQL 5.0 alpha is available for download which includes support for stored procedures.
I remember working on a project a while back involving Microsoft SQL Server and it took me quite a while to get my head around the concept of stored procedures. I’m looking forward to using it with my PHP apps, it’s a really neat way to handle more complex or repetitive series of queries.
I still don’t feel that mySql is a decent database. Stored procedures will be a major leap but as long as these don’t get pre-compiled and closer to the database than in-line sql, there’s no real reason to use them.
I agree that mySQL would probably not be the database of choice for most enterprise level apps but it certainly does do the trick for every-day use.
Needless to say that PHP does a great job when it comes to integrating with mySQL and has probably made the LAMP (linux, apache, mySQL, PHP) setup the most prevalent on the web right now.
I’ve been playing around with stored procedures in mySQL 5 for the last few days now and the immediate benefit I saw was the ability to seperate database logic from my code.
Haven’t done any benchmark tests on execution speed, not sure if there would be much of an improvement there.
There is a great discussion on mySQL tables here, Owen did bring up some interesting counter arguments:
http://www.onrelease.org/index.php?p=79770185&c=1#comments
You would use stored procedures, indeed, to separate business logic (not the same as database logic which you should store in views as a reference) from your layout. Ideally, you can now build 2.5 tier applications using your database to hold your data (obvious, no?), stored procedures to hold your database logic and PHP to layout the data.
The ‘quircks’ Owen described are ‘features’. Every DB has them, including and certainly not excluding Oracle. It’s something you have to live with.
I’m not saying mySql is bad - because it is not. It’s a fine database and amazingly good for a relatively cheap product - certainly considering the fact that an official Sql Server 1 CPU licence will cost you 20k USD. Given this, mySql is certainly value for your money (none).
Benchmark tests would be difficult. You would need several scripts in several languages over several connection types to an identical table and start doing inserts, subsequently random selects and more importantly updates while having at least two indices (one of which clustered - which is a problem because mySql doesn’t have them I think) on the table. Benchmarking is not really necessary if you’re only building a site that will only have to serve 10 pages a minute. It becomes an issue when you have to dish out 100 requests per second.
BTW: do you have anything like a portfolio somewhere? You can msn it to me or mail.
toodles!
come on, image the world without mysql. even if it is not an excellent db, it still works for most applications. Although it lacks some important functions or have some problems, you can not deny it that most web applications are using it.
download mysql 5.0 alpha