first of all thank you that you are reading this. Out of caution, please let me remind you that I don't want you to take this question and to start a "flame war". Arguments with facts would really be constructive.
I am sincerely interested if my current assumptions are true or where I am wrong.
Background:
My current employer asked me about MySQL and I mentioned those points below which were later countered with this:
http://pastie.org/456941
(Large) Parts of this gave me the classical "WTF" moment. So I thought I ask you about this.
Detailed arguments against MySQL from my side:
A long time ago I saw this nice PDF where there were some measurements between PgSQL and MySQL. http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/7.0%20and%20beyond.pdf Title: "FreeBSD 7.0 and Beyond" on Page 9 following there is a Case Study of MySQL vs. PgSQL.
This was for me the first reason to really take a closer look at MySQL.
Secondly I know that MySQL uses two different internal SQL engines. A X/Open XA distributed transaction processing (DTP) support; two phase commit as part of this, using Oracle's InnoDB engine
Full-text indexing and searching using MyISAM engine
Should Oracle at some point decide to revoke the usage rights of InnoDB for the open source community then users of MySQL would need to switch to MyISAM which is, frankly said, terribly slow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL#Criticism Regarding the licensing renewal which is necessary. Now even Oracle is planning to buy Sun, which would make me think hard why they would renew the license of InnoDB for MySQL anyway? (creating competition - "multi-year" extension of their licensing agreement, why would they continue?)
The next reason was that I have no theoretical, but empirical proof (I didn't enjoy debugging that) that I end up more often with table data corruption if I run MySQL. Ok, I can repair it, but why should that take up more of my time away doing other more productive things? (It is even mentioned in the Criticism point of the wikipedia link above).
Also critical bugs get fixed slowly. E.g. It took them from 2003-2008 to fix this bug. http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=989
Dear HN, please help me with this question. Again, thank you for your time.