Why did they not consider Oracle or MS SQL Server? They can afford the licensing...

je42 · on July 26, 2016

Oracle ??? Let's start:

- No transactions for DDL changes.

- Oldschool commandline client. auto commit disabled by default. no history.

- Weird sql syntax + semantics. f.e. null == empty string.

mschuster91 · on July 26, 2016

I'd add

- Oracle InstantClient SDK needs an Oracle account to download and is closed source, and is not available as a package for anything except rpm-based distros

- getting it to run with PHP is a major PITA, once again due to the above-mentioned issues

- Holy f..ing cow, why does it translate everything down to ASCII by default instead of returning raw bytes?

- It's expensive as f..k

- Try to run a query using InstantClient with a ; at the end, it will barf

- DID I MENTION IT CANNOT DO A SIMPLE LIMIT AFTER AN ORDER BY?! (at least not until 12.1, which was released in 2013; due to various issues, one including the pricing, I have seen multiple orgs running way older versions. But come on, over 30 years with only ROWNUM?!)

quicksilver03 · on July 26, 2016

I'm with you on all of your points except auto-commit: having it off by default is much better, it forces you to explicitly commit when you change data and thus think if you really want to persist the changes.

je42 · on July 28, 2016

yes. except that all other clients have auto commit on. thus if you transition from that to auto-commit off. You face two issues: 1. you don't know. and you thing you commited something but actually you didn't 2. you forgot and you committed something. but transaction keeps an row lock open and you bring down the server... :)