One Size Fits All

I was pointed to an article about how the “one size fits all” database model doesn’t work anymore — how Oracle, DB2 and Ingres were written so long ago, they’d have to be rewritten to meet the needs of today’s database users. Jacob Nikom pointed the article to me; apparently he contacted the author and started to explain how MySQL meets that criteria, but the author disagreed.

Read the article for yourself:
http://www.databasecolumn.com/2007/09/one-size-fits-all.html

Anyone else notice the irony of saying “all those other DBMS’s aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution, but this one is?” I think that MySQL comes the closest to a DBMS that is NOT “one size fits all”, given the multiple storage engines available. What other DBMS will allow you to use your Amazon S3 account as a table? What other DBMS will allow you to use a .csv file as a table without importing? It’s not perfect, because there’s still a basic layer of functional implementation that the MySQL server handles (and must), but it’s the closest.

Note that the article is written by the founder and CTO of the software solution mentioned.

I was pointed to an article about how the “one size fits all” database model doesn’t work anymore — how Oracle, DB2 and Ingres were written so long ago, they’d have to be rewritten to meet the needs of today’s database users. Jacob Nikom pointed the article to me; apparently he contacted the author and started to explain how MySQL meets that criteria, but the author disagreed.

Read the article for yourself:
http://www.databasecolumn.com/2007/09/one-size-fits-all.html

Anyone else notice the irony of saying “all those other DBMS’s aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution, but this one is?” I think that MySQL comes the closest to a DBMS that is NOT “one size fits all”, given the multiple storage engines available. What other DBMS will allow you to use your Amazon S3 account as a table? What other DBMS will allow you to use a .csv file as a table without importing? It’s not perfect, because there’s still a basic layer of functional implementation that the MySQL server handles (and must), but it’s the closest.

Note that the article is written by the founder and CTO of the software solution mentioned.

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