This is a real question asked by Ivan Zoratti in his blog post.
Another frequently heard question is : Should I still use MySQL now that my business is turning into a very serious business or should I switch to Oracle 11G.
To illustrate this question let me talked about MySQL users I met last week.
Last week I went to a big e-commerce exhibition in Paris ( 3 days 27.500 visitors)
The e-commerce | m-commerce business is a booming market segment. It involves various activities : digital marketing, price comparators, web analytics, social commerce ...
But it also includes very critical areas like logistics, payment, monetization ... This business is now representing more than 100 Billions both in US and EU.
So I questioned many company in various area. I must confess that all of the one I met relied on MySQL except one that was using Microsoft + SAS ( the statistics tool to do market segmentation). None of them had really chosen MySQL vs Oracle. They chose MySQL when there were small start-ups companies and could not afford Oracle.
In fact many of them still use MySQL community (GPL product) for free.
But now they realized that their business is becoming a serious one generating nice turnover with profits and excellent growth perspective.
As volume, traffic, criticity increase many are worried about the ability of MySQL to fit with their growing business.
Will MySQL be technically able to handle the volume, the high transaction level, the high availability ? Will it technically allow to maintain a 100% on-line business.
They have been fully reassured by the commitment of Oracle to invest in MySQL and make it a better database.
The latest announces about MySQL 5.5 improvement in performance and scalability made them confident they made the right choice.
The improvement on replication reliability, the availability of online backup with MySQL, the improvement on partitioning, all this made them feel Oracle is truly making MySQL better.
They have been also totally convinced by the very lively and innovative MySQL community : spider storage engine , flexview materialized views, Qgraph storage engine, column based storage engine, smart patches or improvement developed by key users. They got the feeling that this is the place where things are happening and innovation is taking place openly.
The capacity to replicate from Oracle to MySQL through Goldengate made them confident they could integrate with more classic IT if necessary.
So for me the main question that was answered by Oracle for these customers was : Should I still rely on MySQL now that I am doing big business ?
and the answer is obviously : YES you can rely on MySQL.