I am another fan of your blog like Mark, but totally disagree with your analysis of InnoDB.
I have worked for several years on Oracle (since 5.0) and on Ingres, Sybase as well as other object oriented databases like FAME & Vision but have never seen an implementation this clean.
I love Oracle and InnoDB comes next in quality.

InnoDb is one on the most well written database code that even after 14 years or writing is still well intact and easy to understand. The fact that the code has not been disfigured shows the quality of writing.

There are lot more features that people would wish, and of course not all were added at the speed that a commercial database would add them for reasons that you can guess.

MySQL of course has a long way to improve, but I can say with certainty that most of the success MySQL (in web world) has got has to do with InnoDB’s quality.

It is way better than other storage engines that you mentioned. Actually if you ask MySQL folks they will tell you that PBXT http://www.primebase.org/ engine actually is better than the other you have listed here.

imho MySQL/InnoDB has three advantages over a leading closed source database brand:

1. performance per $ invested is unsurpassed. Most often it’s very competitive even if you count TCO, not just open source.
2. open source which means you can fix it yourself or with the help of a few good people.
It also contributes to #3 below. People wouldn’t want to embarass themselves by releasing the product based on code which is either naturally lame or hastily written to meet a release deadline. When the source code is closed sloppy coding often flourish.
3. high quality. It is actually high quality as far as silly bugs resulting in crashes are concerned.

Actually, this is almost the ideal client for me, based on their application.

As for the rest, my cat is worse than mediocre at hunting vermin and insects, which is about the only feline duty I can think of to measure him by. But I love him dearly anyway, and wouldn’t trade him for any other. Mediocre != universally unsuitable.

Which of the missing features make it mediocre?

It is nonsense to claim that InnoDB is slow and MyISAM is fast based on the speed of SELECT COUNT(*) FROM FOO. You need better clients. Which RDBMS vendors run that query fast without doing an index or table scan?

I stand by the mediocrity claim, based on a broad lack of features. As for performance, I have clients who reiterate the conventional wisdom based on their own experience. (E.g., the one I was at Friday, who don’t count something as performant unless it has a fast COUNT *). But I’ll confess to never having looked closely enough at your tests to judge what kinds of uses they do or don’t cover.

Best,

CAM

I love your blog, but I think you need to be more careful when your writing mixes what you know (and you know a lot) with what you have been told. According to you MyISAM is fast and InnoDB is slow and mediocre. I disagree and I use InnoDB a lot. I also run a lot of performance tests with it. In most cases that matter to me, InnoDB is much faster than MyISAM. The combination of InnoDB+MySQL is extremely stable for me (MTBF for software crashes measured in centuries). I guess I am the anomaly.

One job posting you had described ScaleDB as “newly funded”. What does that mean?

Best,

CAM

We just announced the beta of our shared-disk clustering storage engine for MySQL. With the Oracle acquisition of Sun, things get complicated, especially since our storage engine delivers shared-disk clustering like Oracle RAC. We live in interesting times.