MySQL Reviews

The solution is primarily used for mobile applications and IoT-based services. It's a good choice for development. 

The solution is very stable.

The scalability has been great.

The deployment process is pretty fast.

It would be ideal if the solution had more references available in terms of helping me find answers to issues or problems. When I run into issues, I really have to research how to fix them. 

The installation process could be better.

I would like the product to have even better stability and scalability.

I've been using the solution for a couple of years.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution is scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's easy.

We have 500 users on the solution at this time. We are likely to increase usage in the future. 

We don't really have access to technical support. Our engineers have to spend time looking for answers on Google. 

Previously, we only used Oracle databases, which were expensive. We've moved away to other DBs and have begun to use MySQL.

The installation process didn't take very long. It took about three or four hours.

We have five people, who are engineers, that can handle setup and maintenance tasks. 

I handled the implementation myself. I did not need the assistance of any integrators or consultants. 

You do need a license in order to use MySQL.

The solution can be deployed both on the cloud and on-premises. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to other users and organizations. 

We're on a software development team. We develop applications.

We're currently running version 5.7 of MySQL, and we are going to be upgrading to version 8 this year.

MySQL server currently is in a co-location center. We've got a hosting provider that takes care of that for us. We are looking at moving it into AWS, but that won't happen this year. We do have a smaller MySQL RDS instance in AWS right now, but it is pretty minimal. 

It is free, which is probably its most valuable feature. It is a pretty full-featured relational database. It really does everything we need it to do. 

The availability of tools could be improved in the MySQL open-source platform. They can provide more analytical tools. I haven't had any particularly difficult issues to troubleshoot on MySQL, but in the past, on Microsoft SQL Server, I had to troubleshoot some difficult issues, and better tools were in place to see what was going on in real-time on the server. So, that's the bit that is lacking on the MySQL open-source platform.

I have been using MySQL for seven years in my current company, and I have probably used it for another two or three years in a previous company.

It is very stable.

I haven't dealt with them.

We're using the open-source version right now, which is free. I do see some value in some of the more enterprise functions. We're using the open-source version right now, and I was interested in the MySQL Enterprise version really for the tools that they provide, but we decided not to make the purchase.

There are certain things that it doesn't do as well as SQL Server. There are certain things that you can do to swamp the server, such as it is just not very responsive to more complicated joins and things like that. Unfortunately, you have to try to learn what those things are, but there are certain things like correlated sub-queries and more complicated approaches that it doesn't support, and you can hang the server in doing that. So, even though it has standardized the SQL queries and other things, there are some things that it doesn't perform particularly well, such as more complicated joined scenarios. We join several tables at a time, but we tend to do that on well-known indices, primary keys, and things like that, but if you're doing something more sophisticated than that, it becomes more challenging. These things that I've mentioned are written up by people, and once you learn those things, you develop techniques to work around them. You take different approaches to solve the problem for those things. You have to do that anyway as a developer. You don't just write code and throw it out there on a production server. You certainly need a totally separate test environment and all that.

I would rate MySQL an eight out of 10.

I used it for a small customer database company in England with 20 employees. They didn't have that much data, and we needed something easy to install and easy to run. This was my use case for it.

My main reason for using MySQL for this small customer database company and for some kinds of scientific projects was that I had to do the installation myself. I didn't have a database administration team behind me. Therefore, I was looking for something very easy to handle. MySQL is easy to install, connect, and do all such things.

Its scalability can be better. It is probably not as scalable as Oracle. 

I had some issues with connectors. I used it from a C++ program, and it required some work to make it run, but finally, it worked.

I have been using this solution for two or three years.

I used it for a small customer database company in England with 20 employees. There were only two people using it. It was really a small solution. For this purpose, it was perfect, but I'm not sure how it scales. It was just not an issue in this case because we had very little data. 

Their technical support is fine.

It is easy to install. It takes just a few hours.

I will probably keep on using this solution. If you have a limited amount of data you want to store in the database, and you don't want to spend a lot of time on administration, it is certainly fine. 

I would rate MySQL a ten out of ten. It was perfect for our use case. 

We are primarily using it as a database for our products. For internally built systems, we have MySQL. We use it internally.

It's our database due to the fact that it's cheaper and is actually free to use.

The product is very easy to use, yes.

It's quite stable.

The solution is very compatible with many versions of Linux. Most of Linux is free, so it's easy to implement with MySQL. Whether it's Ubuntu, CentOS, or different types of Linux, it's the same across other operating systems, and therefore it's very easy to use and compatible with any demand that comes from developers. At the end of the day, MySQL is compatible with most of the platforms.

The solution has been very easy to scale so far.

The installation process is very easy.

The backup methods need improvement. MySQL needs to improve its backup methods so that you can actually do a backup without affecting products. Currently, when you're doing your backup, it locks the database. When someone tries to access it during a backup, it fails to read or to update. They can improve on the backup and all the backup features in general.

I've been using the solution for more than five years at this point. It may be as much as seven years or so.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable in terms of performance.

The solution is very scalable. If you want to install it in the machine and scale that machine, you can do so. Or you add more machine nodes whereby you are actually clustering items and you're clustering your database within one site. The solution will actually extend these needs to another site for replication, DR replication.

We have about 20 people using the solution currently.

We do plan to continue to use the solution in the future.

All of our support is internal. We haven't subscribed to outside technical support.

That said, we haven't had any issues with the solution that would require support assistance either.

The initial setup is not complex at all. It is very easy to install as most of the Linux comes embedded so that even if you're under a different administrator, you should be able to just click and install.

Installation doesn't take more than 10 minutes for me. It might take up to 30 minutes or an hour for someone who is new. However, for someone who is used to MySQL, doesn't take more than 10 minutes to set up.

For deployment and maintenance, basically, we would need about three engineers. The one that actually does the hardware infrastructure, the one that does the operating system, and then the one that actually does the MySQL, which is the database administrator.

I handled the implementation myself. I did not need the assistance of integrators or consultants. 

The solution is absolutely free to use. It's one of the reasons we've chosen it.

We do evaluate other solutions. We also use other products, such as Oracle's SQL server.

When a trace comes for MySQL, we will check mostly the cost of installation and the cost for maintaining everything. We are choosing MySQL over the others that are actually licensed solutions mostly due to the fact that MySQL is free.

We are just customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with MySQL.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

I would rate it at a seven out of ten overall. 

My daily tasks are related to data mining and TBICO Spotfire is one of the products that I use. We are a small group of geologists operating in a niche area who are analyzing geochemical data. Our backend database is MySQL and we use products such as Power BI, Tableau, and Spotfire to display data for the geochemists.

I perform data-related tasks such as data manipulation and creating views, then updating the database afterward, all using SQL queries. As part of this, I'm making entries as needed or corrections to data that has already been processed.

Essentially, I'm doing data mining with SQL queries, although I wouldn't call what I am doing Data Mining exactly, because I already know the data model. I know the geochemistry data in my head, so I already know what I'm looking for when I write an SQL query. We're not doing machine learning or AI at this point, although it may come in the future.

Every now and then, we create dashboards for the geochemists, which cover their needs from the data.

The most valuable component for me is SQL Developer. It is pretty simple to use and I don't have anything really bad to say about it. It supports multiple window displays and all of the connections are available. A lot of people use Toad for this type of work, but I have not myself.

The functionality that I use most often is querying the data model.

I would like to see an autocorrect option, where if you're typing a query and you enter a comma instead of space, or something similar, the ability for it to be able to understand based on your previous scripts would be an advantage. For example, if you were to put a comma between your AND statements then it's not going to work. Maybe a smarter application where, as you're writing queries, similar to the way that grammar and spelling are checked when you type a text message on an iPhone, it could be autocorrected.

I would like to have the ability to cancel a query in SQL Developer. Specifically, I would like to be able to cancel the query should I accidentally write one that's going to loop, or have a JOIN wrong, where you get millions of records joining with millions of records over and over again. The availability to hit cancel so that it doesn't keep running would be helpful because, when such a thing happens, then you have to shut down the whole application and you lose any queries that you might've typed before.

I have been working with MySQL for approximately nine years.

This application is pretty easy to scale.

Within my department, which is technical data management, approximately 75% of the people use MySQL.

I have never had to deal with technical support from Oracle directly. We just raise tickets that go up and show operations, and in turn, they are the ones that deal with Oracle.

I have used several versions of Oracle MySQL including 10, 11, and 12, and I don't really see any difference between them.

MySQL comes pre-installed with our new PCs, so I have never been involved with the initial setup.

On the operations side, based on what I have seen in terms of people putting in tickets for issues, it seems that we have three people who support and maintain MySQL at different levels. I feel that having this number of resources assigned to maintaining a database is wasteful.

I think that a single person can be in charge of maintaining multiple databases.

As a data analyst, I am not in operations and don't have a say in which products we use.

My advice for anybody who is implementing MySQL is to ask around because there are many different ways that you can create a database now. Relational databases are no longer the best way to organize your data. It really depends on what it is that you're doing. For example, you may not need a relational database, but instead just a file structure. So, look at all of your options and speak with the experts to see what kind of database is needed before assuming that you need an RDBMS.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I have been working for 25 to 30 years in this domain, and during this time, I have used various products such as MySQL, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL. Currently, in my product, I am using PostgreSQL, and in some projects, I am using MySQL. We are using the latest version of this solution.

We do projects for various government departments. We have used this solution for the transport department for vehicle registration, driving license, and all such things. We have also used it for port projects, depots, educational counseling projects, school databases, higher education, and health registry. As an organization, we have a lot of use cases of this solution.

It is very easy to install and has all basic database features.

We require more ease of use, scalability, and high availability. These are some of the critical features that we use and look for in a product. It should be easier to manage clusters. Scalability is very important for us because our projects and concurrency requirements are quite big. We also require high availability of the server, application, and other things.

It should also have more performance-based features or enhancements from the performance point of view. When we divide a database, it should be able to handle the queries very fast.

Whenever required, we also take support, but our people are quite experienced. They are able to manage it most of the time.

Its installation is quite easy.

We have our own people who do the deployment. We have various teams for various projects, and the size of the deployment team depends on the project. We have people who basically look after the DB activities, installation, and consolidation.

There is a licensing cost because we are going for a proprietary product. There are some other versions for which there is no licensing cost.

I would recommend this solution depending on the project. If a project requires the kind of features that are available in this solution, I would recommend this solution.

I would rate MySQL an eight out of ten.

It is an ideal database to use online learning environments and SMEs. It works well with  Moodle, the open-source learning solution, and is the defacto standard for that product as Moodle is written in PHP which generally goes hand-in-hand with MySQL. As it is an open-source and free solution it is an economical method of storing important companies or small business data. At the same time, it offers a rich set of functions comparable to other large-scale enterprise solutions such as SQL Server and Oracle. 

MySQL is easy to configure, use, and implement. It is free, and cost-effective, with a powerful plethora of tools. It has improved my organization for my clients using Moodle and MySQL databases, as problems are usually easier to fix quickly, and the database resources can be optimized, easily. Even though it is not as sophisticated as SQL Server and Oracle solutions, it is the database of choice for most Moodle implementations. It has a history of reliability, which is always useful in a business environment.

The Cross-platform support for MySQL is great, as you don't need to worry about which platform or operating system you need to install the platform. This allows for interoperability.

Like other databases, it has a rich set of functions, such as stored procedures and its own procedural language, which is akin to Oracle SQL. It also has trigger and cursor commands you would expect with a good database language.

Views are updateable, which is useful when you need to amend a specific view of data for different circumstances.

It has it's own Data Definition Language (DDL), and provides an Information Schema, to view what is "under the bonnet" of your database.

MySQL tutorials and guides could be improved. Often they are too complex for someone with no database experience to understand. 

It is not an easy database to learn for the novice, and very often users need to take a course, employ the use of an online tutor, or IT professional to assist. Also, it is known that it is often difficult to locate guides for specific functions for developers.

It might be good to have some way of creating web services easier, rather than having to write a User Defined Function (UDF) in PHP.

I have been using MySQL for about 10 years.

MySQL has a reputation for stability, and that is one of the reasons it is so popular. Because it is easily available, just works, and can be integrated reasonably easily into other software, it is often the default platform of choice. 

It has been around for years, and chances are it will be around for the next 10 years or so, as new versions continue to evolve.

MySQL is scalable for SMEs and works on a number of different operating systems.

I have not had many issues with MySQL in the past, so I rarely use the support service.

I have used various databases in the past, but for my current business needs, MySQL is ideal.

It was a simple setup, as it was included in the Moodle installation process for implementing learning sites.

ROI is not applicable, as MySQL is open source and is free, so you could say it is only the investment of implementing the database in your environment.

Pricing depends on the size of your business. For an individual to SME sized business the MySQL solution should be adequate for your needs. Setup costs are minimal.

Yes, but for Moodle Learning sites, SQL Server is more complex, and is not multi-platform, Oracle is not recommended for Moodle, but the nearest to MySQL is ProstgreSQL. MySQL is reliable and easy to use. 

You do need to have technical knowledge of databases in general, but MySQL is not too difficult to learn if used alongside PHPMyAdmin, but there are other tools you could consider, such as MySQL Workbench.

We sell MySQL to customers who need to build second tier applications, not their core application. For some of our customers, when they are planning to build their second tier application, they will choose MySQL rather than Oracle which is more expensive.

The one interesting thing about this product is that it is open source. It comes from an open source product. MySQL has been positioned as open source, but it also provides support. Therefore, for a senior level product like MySQL it is different than a product like MariaDB or MongoDB which are also open source databases but they depend on the community for support. 

People just assume it is less expensive. The product is not expensive. But they also have a strong principle behind data backup and supporting that product. That's why it's quite interesting, because it's open source but it has a principle behind it.

In terms of what could be improved, some of the features that Oracle has, MySQL also has. Like if a customer is looking for a high availability solution, a security solution, a monetary solution, they can have all that in an expensive product like Oracle but they can also have it when they're using MySQL.

Every product has their own pros and cons, and also has their own market. So if the customer is already using or has already used Oracle for a long time they will know the look and feel and the character of this database that can fit into their business.

They will not choose MySQL over Oracle if they already know about Oracle. But if they start to build a new application before they are creating a secondary application then they may not be familiar with Oracle and they will try MySQL. Maybe they will like it because they will see that this database also has complete features. If they try Oracle they find the same features but different pricing. In certain things, MySQL cannot have the same benefits as Oracle but for some customers who are already using Oracle, you're not going to move to another product even if it's more expensive.

And MySQL is a cheaper product.

That's why I say that MySQL has many of the same features as Oracle. Both of them have high security.

The customer that comes from a small or medium business will prefer to choose MySQL rather than the Oracle database because they already know that this product is best for their business because it is not expensive compared to Oracle. 

Oracle does have different versions with different prices. The cheaper is called the Standard Edition. And the most expensive is the Enterprise Edition.

MySQL is comparable to the Oracle Standard Edition if we compare peer to peer. But the difference is that the Standard Edition doesn't have features like the Enterprise edition. But the high security and the high probability are not in the Standard Edition. But MySQL will have it. It will have all those kinds of features with a lower price. Because the Standard Edition is more expensive than MySQL.

Every kind of enterprise company has a core application on which their business depends. Mostly they will just choose the Oracle database. Why? Because of Oracle database's capability to handle the big workload for enterprise businesses. I think that will become their priority and MySQL will not be an option for them.

But someday I would like to see the enterprise companies changing their mindset. If you are talking about core applications related to the high workload in the future, they can choose MySQL as well. Maybe not now, because right now they still see MySQL as for small/medium business and not for the enterprise business. But I hope in the future MySQL can be seen as on the same level for their database.

That will mean that all enterprise companies can have two options when they are choosing a database solution for their core application; either Oracle database or MySQL.

I'm a reseller of MySQL. I've been selling this product for one or two years.

In terms of stability I think MySQL is categorized as a stable product. We have customers who are using MySQL as its database as an online application and it's like an online store. So it means that the work is quite heavy but we are using MySQL for it. 

In terms of scalability, because the application is online, MySQL grows when their business grows and expands with the system. They may need to add more servers, but when they add more servers it means MySQL also expands.

MySQL has that kind of capability - when the servers grow they have some kind of clustering method or clustering concept, which makes it scalable onto several servers. So it will follow the growth of the servers to cover the business.

I have been handling Oracle products for more than 10 years so I know about their kind of technical support characteristics.

For MySQL, when the customer has a problem they get their support from the Oracle portal. That means, the manual of support is online and the customer needs to register on the portal and if they have some issue or some problem using the product they need to create a ticket, and escalate or submit the ticket to the portal. Later on, they will get support from Oracle support which is worldwide.

They have their own SLA for giving support because they apply a severity level depending on how you categorize the error.

The highest severity is severity one. I think there are three or four levels. When the problem is not income to the business, you can categorize as a level three, it's a normal error. But if the error or the condition is impacting the business you can assume that is a severe one. So if you create a ticket and mark it as severe one then Oracle will directly contact Oracle support. They will contact you to help you to solve the problem within five minutes.

The initial setup is categorized as a simple and user-friendly installation. It is not complex.

I have experience installing Oracle, and if you just do the default install without too many customization, you can finish it in about one or two hours. For MySQL I think it is one hour to complete the installation.

In terms of license cost, I think the one that we are selling for MySQL is not a perpetual license like we are selling for the Oracle database.

The Oracle database license we are selling is on a perpetual basis. MySQL has that too, but for MySQL we are selling only the support.

That means that the subscription we are selling for one year consists of software support for MySQL.

That's the difference between Oracle and MySQL.

My message to our customers out there is that you want to get a good product. A good product in terms of the cost and an effective solution. But you also need some guarantee that this product will be supported by the principle.

Because there are so many cheaper products out there but they don't have principles to support the product. They rely on the community for the troubleshooting.

So I recommend to the customers to try this product. MySQL comes from open-source so it means it's a cost-effective solution. But the important thing is this product has its own principle that is supporting this product. It means you don't have to worry as long as you have a bit of a principle behind you to cover and support you. So you can use this product with less worry because you have a principle behind you. That is my message to the customers.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give MySQL an eight.

I like the simplistic view of MySQL to build custom queries and things like that as compared to SQL Server, which seems more cluttered.

SQL Server has a query analyzer. MySQL pretty much does the same, and performance-wise, it has less overhead for connecting to our ERP system. It seems more responsive and cleaner. With MySQL, you get what you need without any overbloating, for which Microsoft is known. That's why they have so many constant security patches for everything because there is so much stuff, which degrades performance.

The GUI interface probably can be improved. Let us say I want to see the relationships in the database. In the query analyzer, I would like to go and drop the tables and create relationships between the tables. I haven't found a feature like that in MySQL. It was a shortcoming even in SQL Server.

MySQL can have more performance monitoring tools. I know Google has these tools, but within MySQL, there are not that many tools to monitor things like performance and database locking. They might be in there, and I might not be familiar enough to know where they are. I am a pretty new user of MySQL.

I have been using MySQL for three months.

It has very good stability. We haven't had any issues with it.

It has good scalability. You can use the Google interface to build it on the cloud. If you start noticing performance issues or you see it taking up memory or resources, you can add another processor. It is pretty easy to do. Right now, we are in beta. We haven't rolled it out completely to the people.

I haven't had to use their technical support. They have plenty of online resources. If you have any problem, you can just search for it and find the answer. Somewhere, someone has done it before.

The ERP company that we work with is moving away from SQL to MySQL. From my understanding, it is because of the cost. MySQL is also more streamlined and gives them what they need. 

Even though I am a SQL Server person, MySQL has come a long way from what it used to be. They have made great strides. It seems like Google is moving more and more to it. In Google Data Studio, which gives you an interface to build dashboards, when you try and connect to new resources, you will notice they prefer MySQL on the cloud or a private server. Google is leaning more towards the MySQL side of things, and they make it very easy. It is a lot more work trying to connect to SQL Server. MySQL seems to be the preferred cloud database that people are going for.

The initial setup was straightforward. MYSQL installation has fewer options than a SQL Server installation, which has endless options. MySQL installation is more straightforward and streamlined. It doesn't have a lot of extra features. It is just a database. It is a database engine that gives you what you need, and I like it.

I am doing one installation right now on Google Cloud. I am building an instance of MySQL. It is just more simplistic. It is more to the point and what you need. In SQL Server, you need to dive into the endless options, and you use maybe 60% of what is there. There is a lot of stuff that people don't use, which you end up uninstalling because it affects the server performance, and it is a service that you are not even using. There is a full install as well as a custom install with SQL Server. If you go for the full install, it throws everything into the server, and you start noticing performance issues. Then you realize that there are services that you are not even using. Some places don't even use analytics or reporting services.

Microsoft licensing for SQL Server is probably ten times more expensive. I used to work for the government, and I remember when we were looking into upgrading to the enterprise version of SQL Server 2019, the licensing was going to cost 350,000. To get the equivalent in the cloud, it was going to be about four grand to get the same processing power and everything else. With MySQL, it was going to be about 300 for the same licensing. 

Cost-wise, for sure, there is a huge difference. Would you prefer to pay 300 a month or 3,000 to have the same amount of data resources? You might lose a few options that you need, but it isn't worth the price difference.

If you want just a database for data storage, I would recommend MySQL. If you want something that has everything in it, such as reporting services and analytics, SQL Server might be better. Cost-wise, MySQL is almost pricing itself out.

I would rate MySQL an eight out of ten for ease of use, especially for someone who has never used it and implemented it. It was pretty straightforward to implement it. It gives you what you need. It surely provides the basics such as data storage, setting up the tables, etc.

We use multiple models here because we do full development. What we deploy on MySQL is from the Helm chart or it's a Dockerized deployment of MySQL. So we're using the Helm stable chart right now. That's sort of the easiest way to deploy it - to say just one command and it bootstraps your whole database within your classical means or cluster. You can do it locally with mini-crews or developers, for organizational use, or Kubernetes. It's single-node Kubernetes.

Also, you can just deploy MySQL locally with a Helm chart. Regarding production, we have a kind of automated process which is similar to what Spinnaker deploys, with a Helm chart as well as within the cluster. Some other solutions we don't run within the cluster, we use the Cloud version of the database which is Cloud SQL, Google Cloud, and AWS. Those are fully managed ones, of which there are two versions. We have our self-managed version which we run locally and with our DEV cluster and then there is production, as well.

We also use a self-managed version since every cloud provider offers MySQL, even AWS. It depends on the client's needs, how flexible the client is, and also how comfortable they are with MySQL.

We either go with our managed version or the Cloud version. Both are supported because today the Mica server that's actually accessing the database or the piece of software just needs a connection string, it doesn't care if it's running within the Synchronous Cloud. If it's running somewhere else in the Cloud, it's still a private connection on the same network.

So the only differences here are in terms of money costs and whether it's managed or not managed. So for local development, you don't want to have a managed database in the Cloud. You don't need to be tethered to the Cloud, you'd rather just deploy locally. And because we have the same deployment scripts that run locally in DEV and testing, we use the same Helm chart and the same Docker version with MySQL to distribute that through our DEV environment to test the bills and run the test and there is a full QA environment for teaching, as well.

I treat these products kind of as a throwaway versus what a DBA would be. From an organizational point of view, it's difficult to actually define the most valuable features because we have so many different databases. For some of them, Postgres for example, which uses MySQL, is just personal preference with is no real difference. Unless you get to really high volumes or through-putting. So in our case, because of legacy reasons, we started using MySQL, which was a popular database. It's not a bad database, so there was no reason for us to change it to the Postgres. We do use Postgres right now for other tools, but for a main database for application purposes, we still stick to MySQL. And I think it's just because of legacy, there's no real advantage of one over the other right now.

We built up the scripts already. Because once you start integrating the scripts into your company, your deployment scripts, test scripts, etc. you just leave it over time because it takes effort to change. But in terms of advantages or features, you can go feature by feature with any database and if you add up the totals, there's no real advantage here between Postgres or MySQL.

As for what can be improved, right now we don't use the MySQL cluster. There is a MySQL cluster that you can run in a standalone mode, like a single database or you can do it in a cluster master-slave implementation. The cluster is not the best when it comes to MySQL. That's why we switched to MariaDB. For that simple reason that the cluster there is better. It's more manageable and it's easier to work with.

We decide what to use depending on the needs. For example, if we need to mount something in a cluster mode, we use MariaDB, which again, is a Dockerized solution with a Helm chart as well, and it's very easy for us to deploy and manage, and also to scale when you just increase the number of slave versions. So MySQL doesn't have that great support when it comes to clusters. You can definitely use MySQL for that too, both support clustering, but the MariaDB is better.

Additional features that I would like to see included in the next release of this solution include better support for backups. Because if you go with the MySQL Percona version, it gives you the tools to back it up securely. The vanilla version of MySQL doesn't have that. It actually does have it, but it is just really poorly executed. I would improve the backup system as well as the encryption. To make it smoother right now takes too much work. It should be a little bit smoother to backup the encrypted data the way you want it and have the ability to push it anywhere you want. That is not part of it right now.

Now it is a database, so you don't know what you're going to do with it. It's difficult. You're just going to come up with solutions. But I think you can generalize here and come up with really simple solutions, which we have already in MySQL. That's probably the one thing that I would try and push right now for people to switch. But people are still not biting, because if you go with the managed version, then all the backups are taken care of for you by Amazon or Google or Microsoft. Then you really don't care. But for us, since we're doing it locally, self-hosted, we would like to have better tools for locking up the data.

Right now, one aspect that is also linked to backups is running things in a crosscheck with semi-managed solutions. This requires a bit of a context. Since we're running things within the clustered communities, we're kind of pushing the Cloud into the cluster. We also want to push some of the tools for the database into a cluster, as well. So these are what we call Kubernetes operators. And there's MySQL operators that were first developed by the community. Those kind give you the ability to backup data within the cluster. So now you have a fully managed solution running from your cluster. These are called MySQL Kubernetes operators.

We are looking into those right now to upgrade our solution, which would mean that we can just execute our backup natively within Kubernetes, not via special scripts. This would make it much easier to actually deal with any kind of MySQL issues within the cluster, because it would be cluster-native. That's what the operators are for.

I think Oracle just created a really good one. It surprised me that they have this. It's not because of Oracle, but they got pushed by the community and actually created the MySQL Operator for Kubernetes, and that's what we're moving towards.

This is going to give you an ability to have a cloud-managed solution within the cluster. And then you can ask the MySQL Operator for the database. They'll partition the database and give it to you. So it will change the nature from you deploying it to you just asking the cluster to give you a database. It's a fully managed solution right from the cluster.

So that's what we're heavily looking into right now. We'll be switching to using Kubernetes MySQL Operators. It's a high-availability cluster running within the Kubernetes cluster.

Right now we're pretty good with that. It's working fine. We're trying to find some time to actually release that globally everywhere. That's where I am right now.

But in terms of technology, if you give up Oracle, you just go to a MySQL operator. That's the one we're using, what we're actually looking at - to create, operate and scale mySQL and sell it within the cluster. This idea of having a cognitive MySQL becomes much easier to manage within the cluster, as well. So you don't have to go with the cloud solution with AWS or Google cloud or Amazon MySQL or the Microsoft version.

The Oracle SuperCluster is the Oracle MySQL operator. That's what we we are looking into a lot right now. Mainly because it does backups on demand - it's so easy to backup. You can just tell Kubernetes to backup and you don't have to run special scripts or special extra software or codes to back it up. You can make the backup as you would do anything else. Send a backup or some other data source or insert an Elasticsearch into it here. Just say "Kubernetes, back it up" and you know Oracle has this adapters within the cluster to back it up for you taking increments or different companies. So that makes it really nice and easy to use and to deploy.

With that kind of solution you can ask to class or petition the database how you want. So again, it changed the nature of the kind of push-to-pull second nature system. Are you pushing your containers to a cluster? You just say cluster, "give me a database" and the class gives you the base partition database, creates a database in a secure manner, gives the connection to the database, and you're done. Then you can back it up on a schedule on to any backup switches. It's much easier. So once this goes, it is going to be widely adopted, which it should be. But I think people might not have the tech skills right now. But once it's adaptive, maybe in a few more months, it's going to be the number one solution for everybody.

In terms of what I'd like to see in the next release, one thing that's always missing is dash boarding. There's no real BI tool for MySQL, like there is in Yellowfin and all the different tools that you get. They all have MySQL connectors, but there's no specific BI tool for MySQL. Open source projects have sprung up, but they're more general purpose, like Postgress, a MySQL kind of database, a relational database. I don't see any really nice tool like Cabana for elastic searches that I can tell clients to use because it would be too technical for them. They would have to have more technical engagement with writing the course, drag and drop, and creating a graph like in Power BI where you just connect with DIA.

So I'd like to see the grab and drag and drop tables, nice beautiful graphics, and pie charts. You don't necessarily have that with MySQL like you have other solutions, which are really cost prohibitive for some clients. It'd be nice to have an open source solution for that. Decent solutions. I mean decent that I can take to clients. It's so technical. They want to drag and drop.

I have been using MySQL now for five or six years.

This specific version of this MySQL has been battle tested for a long time. Any issues are known issues and we pretty much don't have any problems when they're in production. So it's very stable. When we picked simple switch demand, again, these things came up. But it was quickly resolved. So I guess that's the benefit of going with open source and seeing all those problems ahead of time in source code and having the ability to fix them.

Since we have MySQL specifically, and we have to use it in many different environments, dev, testing, and production. All those different people are using it. Developers, QAs, automated testings running against that. In production we have many different users, so we have different meaningful products that are already running. For example, gotoloans.com. It's a loan application site in Canada that is serving a lot of users daily and is backed by MySQL and Elastic SQL databases. So we're using it for high volume and low volume. We have it in many different projects and many different environments.

We use it in different environments, the production also, and many different products as well.

We do have plans to run everything as a cluster, and probably will slowly switch to MetaDB. That is something we're doing right now. We also have plans to switch it to the managed version as well for production deployments, for the simple reason that we're trying to offload as much as we can from the DevOps people. So if offloading that management database from them will help them, then we'll do it.

Also, there are clients that have preferences when it comes to where the database should be running. For example, one of our major clients wants to run specifically in our database because we built it for them and they're comfortable managing it. You're always more comfortable having a managed version. So if you have a small team with a managed DBA, even though it's more expensive and there's always some issues coming up with it, you can just let Amazon manage it for you, and you don't even have to think about it. You could do the backups and if something happens, they can restore it. And you can scale as much as you want, as well.

In terms of cost, there are different flavors of it. It depends on the solution. Locally, as I said, MySQL is going to stay the way it is right now. We're not going to have a cluster version, because for development we just need a database. You need to have a scalable database or clustered.

So MySQL is going to change. We're in the process of transitioning the production versions to cluster versions for some of the projects because they have more volume. We can see that because of the volume of users, and how many queries they do on a daily basis, they would benefit from having a cluster versus a SQL database. So you can have a master to master cluster, which you can have separately. You can actually manage your read and write separately, and then optimize. So you can give more power to people, to certain queries, spreading across the cluster. So all those sorts of things come with the cluster database. That's going to improve performance.

One of the things that we're doing is looking at the short version of MySQL, which is a new thing. This means a shared database. Elasticsearch is made up of shards. This is a different way of thinking about relational databases like MySQL. Traditionally, MySQL or relational databases, have been crafted by having an instance of equal slave to equal master. You have many slaves and many masters, as well. Now the sharding makes the database a little bit different, and it's more usable for us in terms of the way we deploy things. So we're looking right now at MySQL sharding as well, and a few of the different flavors of that so that we can scale it horizontally. Instead of actually creating an instance of MySQL, we can actually spread across multiple different shards across many instances.

And it's also cheaper as well. Once you start getting into the shard world, it's really cheaper to deal with some of these issues, like clustering issues. So it's more cost-effective.

I have not been in touch with support because any issues that came up, we really just resolve them because it's open-source, so if you look at the code, then you can solve it. There's also lots of community engagement in these databases. There are millions and millions of forums online. So if there's a problem, everybody will be on it trying to fix it. So there are no real major issues here.

The initial setup is straightforward because we're using Docker. So we Dockerize not only our database but the applications, as well, because it's really easy to play as a Docker container, and then tour them to the Kubernetes cluster. It's very easy for us to manage it. And also, we have backups on top of that. So we have a schedule, and a job running, always backing up the system with secure backups. So it's actually very straightforward to get it up and running.

Deployment takes seconds. That's why we can include some of the companies, because we figure a way to do it simply, and you don't have to deal with all the complicated SQL servers, and you can bend a lot into Microsoft.

So for us, deployment is trivial, especially when you use the cloud version. For example, for our database, or cloud SQL, again that's trivial, just a simple deployment. You're up and running within less than a minute, five minutes maximum. Locally, people just deploy those databases every day when they build stuff. Again it takes a few seconds to get that going.

Since we’re running it ourselves, it's our own flavor of MySQL, for dev, and QA, staging, production environments, that cost is basically a part of their running between this cluster. So I can't give you a fixed cost, but I can give you the cost of the entire cluster. There are many nodes in a cluster, and there's many different parts continuously running it. So to fully utilize the cluster, we put everything in it and just try to maximum each node.

So you can have a MySQL database beside a Java Microservice and Angular applications on the same node, and using the same kind of resources. So it would be difficult for me to kind of break it down. Obviously I'll do a deep dive, and I'll look at it, in terms of, what percentage of the CPU is being used by MySQL.

Now when it comes to the Cloud versions, obviously there's a fixed cost with that. So for example, one of the clients uses our database, they chose to go with the extra large version of the ECQ's, and there's a price for that. And you can just get a price quickly, and there's a whole chart of pricing there.

So that's based on clients and their comfort level. We can tell them exactly what performance we're requiring here, and then say, what is the minimal thing we need here, in terms of CPU resources and connections? So that's what you really need for just a cloud version of it. Once we define that, then we tell the client, this is what you really need. You can get away with a smaller version of the virtual machine by using something bigger. To be comfortable they decide to do it. So I'm dealing with the pricing, and the pricing is transparent.

I have all the separate pricing for the databases as well. And from that, you can figure out what the cost is.

There's no licensing fees here because it's open source. So the only fees are really just for using the Cloud resources, even if you go with managed or non-managed, you're still using the Cloud resources. You can be more frugal if you're running it yourself, versus what Google or Amazon will do for you. It'll be a little more pricey to go with them, but because it's a  managed solution, you do have that peace of mind, because they're managing it for you. You just connect with it and just talk with it.

But in our cases, we deploy it, we manage it, we back it up, we do all that stuff. So there's more work that we have to do, but a lot of time we eat up the cost because it's not an expensive thing to do. So it can be more cost effective running within the Coud, than in a non-managed version, self-hosted version. 

At the end of the day, Google and Amazon are still making money, because it doesn't matter if you're running it yourself or it's managed, it's still using the Cloud. It's the same CPU and same RAM. 

So we jumped from version 5.6 to 5.7. That's not the latest version. The latest version is 5.8. We didn't move to eight for the simple reason that there's lots of code-based on 5.7 and there's no incentive for us to change right now. So a lot in the industry have not migrated to version eight yet. Oracle is having difficulty committing people to actually go with that version right now.

MySQL has been battle-tested for years and years. So people were comfortable from 5.6 to 5.7. It wasn't just a minor change, it was actually a major change in terms of the databases. Now, once Oracle started managing MySQL, they didn't do a good enough job. That's when MariaDB was invented when they jumped from version five to eight.

There wasn't enough confidence in that. Because there's so much time invested in it. Because MySQL is not just MySQL, they give it in a cluster mode, when you have huge databases with lots of master-slave nodes. So it's just not a trigger for a DBA to move to a new version that hasn't been battle-tested like their 5.7.

So 5.7 is a good database. That's 1418 right now or something like that. I think that's the one we use in production. So for most DBAs it's difficult for them to change. Also with Google and Amazon, you can choose not to go back for 5.7. It is very easy to create a fully scalable solution with 5.7. So, there's no incentive for people to actually switch.

The biggest lesson I would tell others is regarding the backups. Once you start doing it yourself, backing up becomes a thing. When we sign up the clients, we'll give them a set amount of backups daily and we always give them a little verbiage about how much data can be lost if the thing goes down.

Or for example, if you get hit somewhere, what is the last backup you did? How much are you willing to lose? Backups can become quite complicated, and that's something that you have to manage yourself. We have to come up with clever solutions to do runs within our Dockerized environments in production, which you usually don't get from the community. So we have to do it ourselves.

That became a thing quickly once we started going. But that was years ago. We resolved these issues on the way and we are still making them better over time - how we back up the data, the business, the compliance, where did the issue live, who should have access to that? All that stuff.

So backups are usually the thing that people don't think about. And that can bite you in the ass kind of quickly.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd probably give MySQL a seven. There's definitely room for improvement here in terms of tools that come with the product, the way we deploy it, and the way we back it up. In essence, it's a good beginner base. It's just, the tooling around the database needs a little bit more work. You just need to be fair because it is a good database. It's also an open-source database. You know you can get commercial products that Percona for a commercial version of MySQL or Aurora database MySQL. So if you go with that, then you would probably give a much higher score because you really don't see it at all. It's just close your eyes and click a button and it's there. You don't have to touch it at all.

For us, since we deal with it every day and try to compete with the companies, the small DevOps team tries to be as efficient as they can, and sometimes you have to build too many things around the solution.

The commercial products only have that because they put 20 to 30 people on JSON and they can give it to you faster. That's what Google can do because they're good at the tooling around the database. In the current requests of the work, MySQL Workbench is the default tool to interact with the database. Again, MySQL Workbench is an open-source tool that it gets directly from Oracle. It's okay. It's not the greatest. It gets the job done. It's not a finesse tool. It just gets the job done.

If you hide it behind a main service and you don't see it, it's great. You're good to go.  People talk about Amazon RDS and how great it is. But that's a managed product. If you peel the layers and look at the SQL in there, they put a lot of work around that. It's fully scalable. The money used and the way they restructured that SQL database to actually give you that performance took a lot of work for the AWS people. So they're not going to share that IP with you. And they're definitely not going to release it because other people can pick it up, like Google. Then Google has Cloud SQL, as well. So they also have a MySQL version in there and they don't show you how the backup is, or how they actually manage it or scale it. You don't get that information.

So that's the trade-off between managed and non-managed or self-hosting. It's always that kind of battle, that fight. It depends on the money, depends on the client. If it's for a healthcare issue or one of the hospitals, you just have to decide what they want, what's the best for them and how they're going to be protected. So there are many variables that come into play. It depends on your use case. In general, it’s a good database, I have no problem with it.