I'm reading your concerns and your response to
perrin as "he doesn't understand its architecture."
Now, you have very valid points with regards to MySQL's suitability for certain tasks. Oracle is still the gold standard for a reason (and it's not its pricepoint!). That said, MySQL is suitable for most tasks, assuming you set certain defaults appropriately. I don't ever do anything unless it's in InnoDB or NDB (if I need clustering). I always use the strictest sql mode and I set all my charsets to Unicode or Latin-1 (depending). There are certain features I will never use and certain features I don't consider optional. Same as my thoughts on Oracle, Sybase, and DB2. Oracle's defaults suck horribly. There isn't a single Oracle DBA that would ever consider using them. Does that make Oracle a bad RDBMS?
My criteria for good software:
- Does it work?
- Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?