[lug] mysqldump versus snapshot versus..

[steve at badcheese.com]

>> Oh, we have Oracle Rac too, but it's a huge pain in the butt.  Want to buy 
>> some of our Oracle Rac licenses that we can't get rid of because Oracle 
>> will charge us more per license if we reduce our number of total licenses? 
>> :)
>
> Heh.  That's one thing about the commercial stuff, dealing with whacky 
> pricing policies.
>
> What do you find difficult about Oracle.  I'm not sure what Rac is, but the 
> Oracle systems I've worked on were a snap to back up.  We had the DB on a 
> NetApp Filer, and quiescent mode and a snapshot later, the DB was backed up, 
> took all of two minutes for a VERY large DB...

Oracle Rac is the clustered version or oracle.  Requires a SAN backend, 
several NICs on each machine for heartbeat, etc ...  If it ever fails, you 
need to call Oracle to get it back up and running again if you don't have 
a Oracle DBA on your payroll.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_RAC

I've used Oracle (I'm actually 8i certified, but I don't put it on my 
resume), postgress and mysql quite a bit and I find mysql to be *way* 
easier to admin and mysql users to be much happier with their performance. 
My company uses about 100 instances of mysql 4.x with replication on the 
production machines and it's great.  About 95% of the functionality found 
in Oracle or other DBs is available in mysql if you read the docs and take 
the time to figure it out.  If you need a DB filesystem or something else 
bizarre like that, then I recommend oracle, but mysql is probably the best 
all-around solution.  Most modern-day startups use mysql very heavily on 
their production systems.

BTW, I just finished load-testing our web app with mysql 5.x and it's 
almost a 2x speed improvement over 4.x with the exact same hardware, data 
and test scenarios.  Almost a no-brainer to switch over to 5.x if you have 
that option.

- Steve

-- 
EMAIL: (h) steve at badcheese.com  WEB: http://badcheese.com/~steve