A comparison of

MySQL And Oracle

Jeremy Haubrich
 Importance of choosing the
right database

 High cost for an enterprise system

 Databases can hold the “keys to the castle”
 Databases can give companies a competitive
advantage
Direct comparison isn’t fair
 Oracle and MySQL are built for different markets
 Oracle is designed for the enterprise customer with a big
enough budget and more complex business needs
 MySQL is a lower cost database that is most commonly
used for database driven web sites and non mission
critical applications
 Features that look identical in a brochure may be
implemented very differently (ex. row level locking)
 Cost
 Oracle
 $36,000 per processor for Enterprise Edition +
optional $8,000 for support and software updates
 $5,000 per processor for Standard Edition + optional
$1,100 for support and software updates

 MySQL
 Free to download
 $500 for a commercial license + optional $1,500-
$62,000 for different levels of support
Oracle Features
 Oracle Management Server
 Central administration, monitoring, and tuning of multiple databases
 Schedule and share database tasks with other admins
 Oracle Change Manager
 Allows you to create a change plan and see the effects of your changes
before actually implementing them
 Also shows any changes that cannot be applied
 Administrative Alerts
 Oracle will contact the admin by email or pager when an error
condition occurs
 Can be scheduled to reduce false positives
More Oracle Features
 Capacity Planning
 Tracks usage patterns to help admins plan for upgrades
 Feedback on CPU, disk and query performance
 Query Optimizer
 Oracle chooses the most efficient way to execute a SQL
statement
 Analyzes tables and indexes to minimize the cost of the
transaction
MySQL Features
 Easy to get started with
 Many free GUI management tools like
PHPMyAdmin
 Speed is emphasized over lesser used features
 Uses very little overhead
 MySQL uses just under 1MB of RAM on my laptop
 My Oracle 9i installation uses 128MB while idle
More MySQL Features
 Beginning to support advanced features
 Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views in the next
version (5)
 Select statements with sub-queries were
introduced in the current version (4)
 Transactional tables
 Cascading updates and deletes
 Available through the third-party InnoDB storage
engine
Migragtion from MySQL to Oracle

 As your company grows Oracle may be a better

fit
 Migration tools are available (Oracle Migration
Kit)
 Companies may use both Oracle and MySQL
Differences in syntax
 http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/
 Not all databases use the same SQL syntax
 Example: Returning the first 5 rows of a query
 MySQL
 Select columns
FROM tablename
ORDER BY key ASC
LIMIT 5;

 Oracle
 Select * FROM (
SELECT columns
FROM tablename
ORDER BY key ASC
) WHERE ROWNUM <= 5;
Timestamps
 MySQL
Create a field of type TIMESTAMP and enter an invalid date. In this case
February 29 2003.

mysql> insert into tester values ('2003-02-29 00:05:00');

Query OK, 1 row affected (0.07 sec)

Notice that MySQL doesn't complain about the date.

Checking to see what MySQL enters you see that it just changed the date to
the first day in March.

mysql> select * from tester;

+----------------+
| time |
+----------------+
| 20030301000500 |
+----------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
Timestamps
 Oracle
This will work,

INSERT INTO tablename (columnname)

VALUES (TIMESTAMP'2003-02-28 00:05:00')

while this will fail:

INSERT INTO tablename (columnname)
VALUES (TIMESTAMP'2003-02-29 00:05:00')
Concatenation
 SQL Standard symbol for concat is ||
 MySQL uses || as the OR operator
 Uses concat(string1, string2)
 More familiar to programmers
 Breaks the standard

 Oracle uses || for concat

 Ex. string1 || string2
 Which is better?
 MySQL
 For non mission-critical environments
 Great for database enabled websites
 Attractive price point

 Oracle
 Rock solid dependability, reliability, and features
 Steep learning curve and expensive
 Designed with the enterprise in mind