And I know people who become 100 years old while smoking 2 packs of cigarettes and a handful of cigars every day. Never coughed in their lives. But that doesn't mean I'm convinced smoking isn't bad for your health.

I have been a full-time Sybase DBA. And I have adminned a MySQL server too. I've seen things happening to boxes running my Sybase servers that would corrupt a MySQL database under heavy load, while the Sybase databases recovered flawlessly (that of course doesn't mean you'll never lose or get corrupted data with Sybase) I have turned the key of the wrong box, shutting down a 4 engine database with over 1000 simultanous connections. I've seen brown outs, causing 20 disks to think it's time to spin down while the box itself thinks there's no problem to worry about. I have typoed, deleting vital information in the master database, which I could simply roll back. Can MySQL make a *consistent* dump of a running database? Without referential intrigity or triggers? Can MySQL make incremental dumps? Say, every 15 minutes on a multi-gigabyte server?

The link that questioned MySQL as an adequate database and questioned whether it was just waiting to fall apart at the seams because it doesn't have atomicity or rollback obviously was put together by someone totally unfamiliar with its use in a production environment and who seems like they were more concerned with communicating their knowledge of esoteric (but good to know!) database concepts than reality.

Saying that Philip Greenspun is unfamiliar with the reality of using database in a production environment is barely less absurd than saying Larry Wall is unfamiliar with designing computer languages.

-- Abigail