MySQL Reviews

I like the simplistic view of MySQL to build custom queries and things like that as compared to SQL Server, which seems more cluttered.

SQL Server has a query analyzer. MySQL pretty much does the same, and performance-wise, it has less overhead for connecting to our ERP system. It seems more responsive and cleaner. With MySQL, you get what you need without any overbloating, for which Microsoft is known. That's why they have so many constant security patches for everything because there is so much stuff, which degrades performance.

The GUI interface probably can be improved. Let us say I want to see the relationships in the database. In the query analyzer, I would like to go and drop the tables and create relationships between the tables. I haven't found a feature like that in MySQL. It was a shortcoming even in SQL Server.

MySQL can have more performance monitoring tools. I know Google has these tools, but within MySQL, there are not that many tools to monitor things like performance and database locking. They might be in there, and I might not be familiar enough to know where they are. I am a pretty new user of MySQL.

I have been using MySQL for three months.

It has very good stability. We haven't had any issues with it.

It has good scalability. You can use the Google interface to build it on the cloud. If you start noticing performance issues or you see it taking up memory or resources, you can add another processor. It is pretty easy to do. Right now, we are in beta. We haven't rolled it out completely to the people.

I haven't had to use their technical support. They have plenty of online resources. If you have any problem, you can just search for it and find the answer. Somewhere, someone has done it before.

The ERP company that we work with is moving away from SQL to MySQL. From my understanding, it is because of the cost. MySQL is also more streamlined and gives them what they need. 

Even though I am a SQL Server person, MySQL has come a long way from what it used to be. They have made great strides. It seems like Google is moving more and more to it. In Google Data Studio, which gives you an interface to build dashboards, when you try and connect to new resources, you will notice they prefer MySQL on the cloud or a private server. Google is leaning more towards the MySQL side of things, and they make it very easy. It is a lot more work trying to connect to SQL Server. MySQL seems to be the preferred cloud database that people are going for.

The initial setup was straightforward. MYSQL installation has fewer options than a SQL Server installation, which has endless options. MySQL installation is more straightforward and streamlined. It doesn't have a lot of extra features. It is just a database. It is a database engine that gives you what you need, and I like it.

I am doing one installation right now on Google Cloud. I am building an instance of MySQL. It is just more simplistic. It is more to the point and what you need. In SQL Server, you need to dive into the endless options, and you use maybe 60% of what is there. There is a lot of stuff that people don't use, which you end up uninstalling because it affects the server performance, and it is a service that you are not even using. There is a full install as well as a custom install with SQL Server. If you go for the full install, it throws everything into the server, and you start noticing performance issues. Then you realize that there are services that you are not even using. Some places don't even use analytics or reporting services.

Microsoft licensing for SQL Server is probably ten times more expensive. I used to work for the government, and I remember when we were looking into upgrading to the enterprise version of SQL Server 2019, the licensing was going to cost 350,000. To get the equivalent in the cloud, it was going to be about four grand to get the same processing power and everything else. With MySQL, it was going to be about 300 for the same licensing. 

Cost-wise, for sure, there is a huge difference. Would you prefer to pay 300 a month or 3,000 to have the same amount of data resources? You might lose a few options that you need, but it isn't worth the price difference.

If you want just a database for data storage, I would recommend MySQL. If you want something that has everything in it, such as reporting services and analytics, SQL Server might be better. Cost-wise, MySQL is almost pricing itself out.

I would rate MySQL an eight out of ten for ease of use, especially for someone who has never used it and implemented it. It was pretty straightforward to implement it. It gives you what you need. It surely provides the basics such as data storage, setting up the tables, etc.

MYSQL is our main database. We use it for every project.

I use it for storage procedures, SQL administration, and database administration.

We also use it for the development of reports, and projects that are deployed for our customers. It is also used to develop applications.

The majority of companies use it for their development projects.

It's free. I'm in a big organization, with more than 100,000 employees. If you have to buy a database management system for every project, it would be very expensive. 

Considering the cost-free option, you can use it for POCs,(proof of concept projects), and you can deploy it for customers to reduce project costs. The principal reason is that it is cheap.

Mysql is free : it's an open source project, so you can use it with no cost.

Mysql is well documented, and has a big community.

MySQL adheres to the current SQL standard, although with significant restrictions and a large number of extensions. Through the configuration setting sql-mode you can make the MySQL server behave for the most part compatibly with others like IBM DB/2 and Oracle.

There are a number of convenient user interfaces for administering a MySQL server.

MySQL has supported the storing and processing of two-dimensional geographical data. Thus MySQL is well suited for geographic information systems applications.

MySQL supports the ODBC interface.

For client programming you can use, among others, the languages C#, C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP and Python.

I would like to see a feature added to be able to handle high availability, which would allow us to scale the database or the system on many platforms.

Scalability has to be improved, as you have only one instance of the application, or two, or more instances at max that are connected on one instance of MySQL.

In the next release, I would like to see the scalability features improved to allow you to configure it and reduce the complexity with the configuration, making it easier for the end-user to scale. Make it as simple as it can be.

Add the possibility to define custom data types 

Add OLAP and backup capabilities

I have been using MySQL for more than five years.

It is stable, and in fact, it's more stable than PostgreSQL. Also, recovery is faster.

Scalability is difficult. You can scale it horizontally, but once you have many instances, it is difficult.

You can improve the server, resources that are available, and the processor is good but if you want to scale it on many instances than it is a bit complex.

We use it for customers. We have 10 instances of MySQL independently, on the project we are currently working with.

It's an open-source solution. There is documentation available on the internet, that provides enough to resolve issues quickly.

If you are a technician with practice, there is no issue, it's easy to handle. The documentation is available on the internet. You have everything you need quickly if you are autonomous.

It's easy, you just download it, install it and click next until it's complete.

It's an open-source database management system that can be used free of charge.

I am not using the user interface because I'm a developer. Generally, I just try to find how to use the command-line interface to access what I want for the system.

Oracle is still the best, but it's too expensive.

Before purchasing this solution, know the needs of your environment and be sure that you don't have to scale it. If you want to scale it you will require more knowledge on the product and you will need more support for it.

If you have a little project with a thousand users connected to the instances, it will be able to be scaled. But if you are looking to be able to handle large volumes this is not a good solution for your needs.

If am comparing MySQL with other free solutions then I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use multiple models here because we do full development. What we deploy on MySQL is from the Helm chart or it's a Dockerized deployment of MySQL. So we're using the Helm stable chart right now. That's sort of the easiest way to deploy it - to say just one command and it bootstraps your whole database within your classical means or cluster. You can do it locally with mini-crews or developers, for organizational use, or Kubernetes. It's single-node Kubernetes.

Also, you can just deploy MySQL locally with a Helm chart. Regarding production, we have a kind of automated process which is similar to what Spinnaker deploys, with a Helm chart as well as within the cluster. Some other solutions we don't run within the cluster, we use the Cloud version of the database which is Cloud SQL, Google Cloud, and AWS. Those are fully managed ones, of which there are two versions. We have our self-managed version which we run locally and with our DEV cluster and then there is production, as well.

We also use a self-managed version since every cloud provider offers MySQL, even AWS. It depends on the client's needs, how flexible the client is, and also how comfortable they are with MySQL.

We either go with our managed version or the Cloud version. Both are supported because today the Mica server that's actually accessing the database or the piece of software just needs a connection string, it doesn't care if it's running within the Synchronous Cloud. If it's running somewhere else in the Cloud, it's still a private connection on the same network.

So the only differences here are in terms of money costs and whether it's managed or not managed. So for local development, you don't want to have a managed database in the Cloud. You don't need to be tethered to the Cloud, you'd rather just deploy locally. And because we have the same deployment scripts that run locally in DEV and testing, we use the same Helm chart and the same Docker version with MySQL to distribute that through our DEV environment to test the bills and run the test and there is a full QA environment for teaching, as well.

I treat these products kind of as a throwaway versus what a DBA would be. From an organizational point of view, it's difficult to actually define the most valuable features because we have so many different databases. For some of them, Postgres for example, which uses MySQL, is just personal preference with is no real difference. Unless you get to really high volumes or through-putting. So in our case, because of legacy reasons, we started using MySQL, which was a popular database. It's not a bad database, so there was no reason for us to change it to the Postgres. We do use Postgres right now for other tools, but for a main database for application purposes, we still stick to MySQL. And I think it's just because of legacy, there's no real advantage of one over the other right now.

We built up the scripts already. Because once you start integrating the scripts into your company, your deployment scripts, test scripts, etc. you just leave it over time because it takes effort to change. But in terms of advantages or features, you can go feature by feature with any database and if you add up the totals, there's no real advantage here between Postgres or MySQL.

As for what can be improved, right now we don't use the MySQL cluster. There is a MySQL cluster that you can run in a standalone mode, like a single database or you can do it in a cluster master-slave implementation. The cluster is not the best when it comes to MySQL. That's why we switched to MariaDB. For that simple reason that the cluster there is better. It's more manageable and it's easier to work with.

We decide what to use depending on the needs. For example, if we need to mount something in a cluster mode, we use MariaDB, which again, is a Dockerized solution with a Helm chart as well, and it's very easy for us to deploy and manage, and also to scale when you just increase the number of slave versions. So MySQL doesn't have that great support when it comes to clusters. You can definitely use MySQL for that too, both support clustering, but the MariaDB is better.

Additional features that I would like to see included in the next release of this solution include better support for backups. Because if you go with the MySQL Percona version, it gives you the tools to back it up securely. The vanilla version of MySQL doesn't have that. It actually does have it, but it is just really poorly executed. I would improve the backup system as well as the encryption. To make it smoother right now takes too much work. It should be a little bit smoother to backup the encrypted data the way you want it and have the ability to push it anywhere you want. That is not part of it right now.

Now it is a database, so you don't know what you're going to do with it. It's difficult. You're just going to come up with solutions. But I think you can generalize here and come up with really simple solutions, which we have already in MySQL. That's probably the one thing that I would try and push right now for people to switch. But people are still not biting, because if you go with the managed version, then all the backups are taken care of for you by Amazon or Google or Microsoft. Then you really don't care. But for us, since we're doing it locally, self-hosted, we would like to have better tools for locking up the data.

Right now, one aspect that is also linked to backups is running things in a crosscheck with semi-managed solutions. This requires a bit of a context. Since we're running things within the clustered communities, we're kind of pushing the Cloud into the cluster. We also want to push some of the tools for the database into a cluster, as well. So these are what we call Kubernetes operators. And there's MySQL operators that were first developed by the community. Those kind give you the ability to backup data within the cluster. So now you have a fully managed solution running from your cluster. These are called MySQL Kubernetes operators.

We are looking into those right now to upgrade our solution, which would mean that we can just execute our backup natively within Kubernetes, not via special scripts. This would make it much easier to actually deal with any kind of MySQL issues within the cluster, because it would be cluster-native. That's what the operators are for.

I think Oracle just created a really good one. It surprised me that they have this. It's not because of Oracle, but they got pushed by the community and actually created the MySQL Operator for Kubernetes, and that's what we're moving towards.

This is going to give you an ability to have a cloud-managed solution within the cluster. And then you can ask the MySQL Operator for the database. They'll partition the database and give it to you. So it will change the nature from you deploying it to you just asking the cluster to give you a database. It's a fully managed solution right from the cluster.

So that's what we're heavily looking into right now. We'll be switching to using Kubernetes MySQL Operators. It's a high-availability cluster running within the Kubernetes cluster.

Right now we're pretty good with that. It's working fine. We're trying to find some time to actually release that globally everywhere. That's where I am right now.

But in terms of technology, if you give up Oracle, you just go to a MySQL operator. That's the one we're using, what we're actually looking at - to create, operate and scale mySQL and sell it within the cluster. This idea of having a cognitive MySQL becomes much easier to manage within the cluster, as well. So you don't have to go with the cloud solution with AWS or Google cloud or Amazon MySQL or the Microsoft version.

The Oracle SuperCluster is the Oracle MySQL operator. That's what we we are looking into a lot right now. Mainly because it does backups on demand - it's so easy to backup. You can just tell Kubernetes to backup and you don't have to run special scripts or special extra software or codes to back it up. You can make the backup as you would do anything else. Send a backup or some other data source or insert an Elasticsearch into it here. Just say "Kubernetes, back it up" and you know Oracle has this adapters within the cluster to back it up for you taking increments or different companies. So that makes it really nice and easy to use and to deploy.

With that kind of solution you can ask to class or petition the database how you want. So again, it changed the nature of the kind of push-to-pull second nature system. Are you pushing your containers to a cluster? You just say cluster, "give me a database" and the class gives you the base partition database, creates a database in a secure manner, gives the connection to the database, and you're done. Then you can back it up on a schedule on to any backup switches. It's much easier. So once this goes, it is going to be widely adopted, which it should be. But I think people might not have the tech skills right now. But once it's adaptive, maybe in a few more months, it's going to be the number one solution for everybody.

In terms of what I'd like to see in the next release, one thing that's always missing is dash boarding. There's no real BI tool for MySQL, like there is in Yellowfin and all the different tools that you get. They all have MySQL connectors, but there's no specific BI tool for MySQL. Open source projects have sprung up, but they're more general purpose, like Postgress, a MySQL kind of database, a relational database. I don't see any really nice tool like Cabana for elastic searches that I can tell clients to use because it would be too technical for them. They would have to have more technical engagement with writing the course, drag and drop, and creating a graph like in Power BI where you just connect with DIA.

So I'd like to see the grab and drag and drop tables, nice beautiful graphics, and pie charts. You don't necessarily have that with MySQL like you have other solutions, which are really cost prohibitive for some clients. It'd be nice to have an open source solution for that. Decent solutions. I mean decent that I can take to clients. It's so technical. They want to drag and drop.

I have been using MySQL now for five or six years.

This specific version of this MySQL has been battle tested for a long time. Any issues are known issues and we pretty much don't have any problems when they're in production. So it's very stable. When we picked simple switch demand, again, these things came up. But it was quickly resolved. So I guess that's the benefit of going with open source and seeing all those problems ahead of time in source code and having the ability to fix them.

Since we have MySQL specifically, and we have to use it in many different environments, dev, testing, and production. All those different people are using it. Developers, QAs, automated testings running against that. In production we have many different users, so we have different meaningful products that are already running. For example, gotoloans.com. It's a loan application site in Canada that is serving a lot of users daily and is backed by MySQL and Elastic SQL databases. So we're using it for high volume and low volume. We have it in many different projects and many different environments.

We use it in different environments, the production also, and many different products as well.

We do have plans to run everything as a cluster, and probably will slowly switch to MetaDB. That is something we're doing right now. We also have plans to switch it to the managed version as well for production deployments, for the simple reason that we're trying to offload as much as we can from the DevOps people. So if offloading that management database from them will help them, then we'll do it.

Also, there are clients that have preferences when it comes to where the database should be running. For example, one of our major clients wants to run specifically in our database because we built it for them and they're comfortable managing it. You're always more comfortable having a managed version. So if you have a small team with a managed DBA, even though it's more expensive and there's always some issues coming up with it, you can just let Amazon manage it for you, and you don't even have to think about it. You could do the backups and if something happens, they can restore it. And you can scale as much as you want, as well.

In terms of cost, there are different flavors of it. It depends on the solution. Locally, as I said, MySQL is going to stay the way it is right now. We're not going to have a cluster version, because for development we just need a database. You need to have a scalable database or clustered.

So MySQL is going to change. We're in the process of transitioning the production versions to cluster versions for some of the projects because they have more volume. We can see that because of the volume of users, and how many queries they do on a daily basis, they would benefit from having a cluster versus a SQL database. So you can have a master to master cluster, which you can have separately. You can actually manage your read and write separately, and then optimize. So you can give more power to people, to certain queries, spreading across the cluster. So all those sorts of things come with the cluster database. That's going to improve performance.

One of the things that we're doing is looking at the short version of MySQL, which is a new thing. This means a shared database. Elasticsearch is made up of shards. This is a different way of thinking about relational databases like MySQL. Traditionally, MySQL or relational databases, have been crafted by having an instance of equal slave to equal master. You have many slaves and many masters, as well. Now the sharding makes the database a little bit different, and it's more usable for us in terms of the way we deploy things. So we're looking right now at MySQL sharding as well, and a few of the different flavors of that so that we can scale it horizontally. Instead of actually creating an instance of MySQL, we can actually spread across multiple different shards across many instances.

And it's also cheaper as well. Once you start getting into the shard world, it's really cheaper to deal with some of these issues, like clustering issues. So it's more cost-effective.

I have not been in touch with support because any issues that came up, we really just resolve them because it's open-source, so if you look at the code, then you can solve it. There's also lots of community engagement in these databases. There are millions and millions of forums online. So if there's a problem, everybody will be on it trying to fix it. So there are no real major issues here.

The initial setup is straightforward because we're using Docker. So we Dockerize not only our database but the applications, as well, because it's really easy to play as a Docker container, and then tour them to the Kubernetes cluster. It's very easy for us to manage it. And also, we have backups on top of that. So we have a schedule, and a job running, always backing up the system with secure backups. So it's actually very straightforward to get it up and running.

Deployment takes seconds. That's why we can include some of the companies, because we figure a way to do it simply, and you don't have to deal with all the complicated SQL servers, and you can bend a lot into Microsoft.

So for us, deployment is trivial, especially when you use the cloud version. For example, for our database, or cloud SQL, again that's trivial, just a simple deployment. You're up and running within less than a minute, five minutes maximum. Locally, people just deploy those databases every day when they build stuff. Again it takes a few seconds to get that going.

Since we’re running it ourselves, it's our own flavor of MySQL, for dev, and QA, staging, production environments, that cost is basically a part of their running between this cluster. So I can't give you a fixed cost, but I can give you the cost of the entire cluster. There are many nodes in a cluster, and there's many different parts continuously running it. So to fully utilize the cluster, we put everything in it and just try to maximum each node.

So you can have a MySQL database beside a Java Microservice and Angular applications on the same node, and using the same kind of resources. So it would be difficult for me to kind of break it down. Obviously I'll do a deep dive, and I'll look at it, in terms of, what percentage of the CPU is being used by MySQL.

Now when it comes to the Cloud versions, obviously there's a fixed cost with that. So for example, one of the clients uses our database, they chose to go with the extra large version of the ECQ's, and there's a price for that. And you can just get a price quickly, and there's a whole chart of pricing there.

So that's based on clients and their comfort level. We can tell them exactly what performance we're requiring here, and then say, what is the minimal thing we need here, in terms of CPU resources and connections? So that's what you really need for just a cloud version of it. Once we define that, then we tell the client, this is what you really need. You can get away with a smaller version of the virtual machine by using something bigger. To be comfortable they decide to do it. So I'm dealing with the pricing, and the pricing is transparent.

I have all the separate pricing for the databases as well. And from that, you can figure out what the cost is.

There's no licensing fees here because it's open source. So the only fees are really just for using the Cloud resources, even if you go with managed or non-managed, you're still using the Cloud resources. You can be more frugal if you're running it yourself, versus what Google or Amazon will do for you. It'll be a little more pricey to go with them, but because it's a  managed solution, you do have that peace of mind, because they're managing it for you. You just connect with it and just talk with it.

But in our cases, we deploy it, we manage it, we back it up, we do all that stuff. So there's more work that we have to do, but a lot of time we eat up the cost because it's not an expensive thing to do. So it can be more cost effective running within the Coud, than in a non-managed version, self-hosted version. 

At the end of the day, Google and Amazon are still making money, because it doesn't matter if you're running it yourself or it's managed, it's still using the Cloud. It's the same CPU and same RAM. 

So we jumped from version 5.6 to 5.7. That's not the latest version. The latest version is 5.8. We didn't move to eight for the simple reason that there's lots of code-based on 5.7 and there's no incentive for us to change right now. So a lot in the industry have not migrated to version eight yet. Oracle is having difficulty committing people to actually go with that version right now.

MySQL has been battle-tested for years and years. So people were comfortable from 5.6 to 5.7. It wasn't just a minor change, it was actually a major change in terms of the databases. Now, once Oracle started managing MySQL, they didn't do a good enough job. That's when MariaDB was invented when they jumped from version five to eight.

There wasn't enough confidence in that. Because there's so much time invested in it. Because MySQL is not just MySQL, they give it in a cluster mode, when you have huge databases with lots of master-slave nodes. So it's just not a trigger for a DBA to move to a new version that hasn't been battle-tested like their 5.7.

So 5.7 is a good database. That's 1418 right now or something like that. I think that's the one we use in production. So for most DBAs it's difficult for them to change. Also with Google and Amazon, you can choose not to go back for 5.7. It is very easy to create a fully scalable solution with 5.7. So, there's no incentive for people to actually switch.

The biggest lesson I would tell others is regarding the backups. Once you start doing it yourself, backing up becomes a thing. When we sign up the clients, we'll give them a set amount of backups daily and we always give them a little verbiage about how much data can be lost if the thing goes down.

Or for example, if you get hit somewhere, what is the last backup you did? How much are you willing to lose? Backups can become quite complicated, and that's something that you have to manage yourself. We have to come up with clever solutions to do runs within our Dockerized environments in production, which you usually don't get from the community. So we have to do it ourselves.

That became a thing quickly once we started going. But that was years ago. We resolved these issues on the way and we are still making them better over time - how we back up the data, the business, the compliance, where did the issue live, who should have access to that? All that stuff.

So backups are usually the thing that people don't think about. And that can bite you in the ass kind of quickly.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd probably give MySQL a seven. There's definitely room for improvement here in terms of tools that come with the product, the way we deploy it, and the way we back it up. In essence, it's a good beginner base. It's just, the tooling around the database needs a little bit more work. You just need to be fair because it is a good database. It's also an open-source database. You know you can get commercial products that Percona for a commercial version of MySQL or Aurora database MySQL. So if you go with that, then you would probably give a much higher score because you really don't see it at all. It's just close your eyes and click a button and it's there. You don't have to touch it at all.

For us, since we deal with it every day and try to compete with the companies, the small DevOps team tries to be as efficient as they can, and sometimes you have to build too many things around the solution.

The commercial products only have that because they put 20 to 30 people on JSON and they can give it to you faster. That's what Google can do because they're good at the tooling around the database. In the current requests of the work, MySQL Workbench is the default tool to interact with the database. Again, MySQL Workbench is an open-source tool that it gets directly from Oracle. It's okay. It's not the greatest. It gets the job done. It's not a finesse tool. It just gets the job done.

If you hide it behind a main service and you don't see it, it's great. You're good to go.  People talk about Amazon RDS and how great it is. But that's a managed product. If you peel the layers and look at the SQL in there, they put a lot of work around that. It's fully scalable. The money used and the way they restructured that SQL database to actually give you that performance took a lot of work for the AWS people. So they're not going to share that IP with you. And they're definitely not going to release it because other people can pick it up, like Google. Then Google has Cloud SQL, as well. So they also have a MySQL version in there and they don't show you how the backup is, or how they actually manage it or scale it. You don't get that information.

So that's the trade-off between managed and non-managed or self-hosting. It's always that kind of battle, that fight. It depends on the money, depends on the client. If it's for a healthcare issue or one of the hospitals, you just have to decide what they want, what's the best for them and how they're going to be protected. So there are many variables that come into play. It depends on your use case. In general, it’s a good database, I have no problem with it.

We use MySQL for customer management authentication in our company.

The use of MySQL is really dictated by the software we use. So we have put software that dictates the use of MySQL and MongoDB. We think we've found the goal of the company related to strengthening its business systems.

Since we started the development, like, three years ago, it's just been improving, so there are no areas that need to improve. It is easy to use.

The licensing cost of the solution is expensive, which MySQL needs to consider improving.

I have been using MySQL for three years. It's based on the call systems or based on the console.

I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten since it has been running flawlessly.

It works well. So, I rate its scalability a ten out of ten. Our company is managing hundreds to thousands of clients, but we use MySQL for different projects. So, around 50 users work on it.

In terms of increasing the solution's usage, I think we've done enough, like, stabilizing MySQL.

Our company has contacted the technical support of MySQL. It was very easy to get connected to them. However, it cost us a fortune. For SMBs in South Africa, a thousand or ten thousand dollars an hour is a lot of money. It was expensive, but it was worth it.

We have previously used a solution for location and mapping-related stuff. Our choice to move to MySQL was dictated by software. So, we use different programs for applications.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment process takes a few seconds.

We had to seek the help of some consultants to implement the product since there was some difficult stuff. But that was long ago. Nowadays, we avoid seeking help from consultants since it has become pretty simple. So, better experienced and well-trained people would do it for us. It's not a problem.

I believe we have a few cluster solutions. I think that MySQL is a premium product. But I don't manage that part.

The solution's documentation and support are awesome. Also, its speed has increased in the last few years. So, we have never had any issues with it. If there were any errors, then they were human errors.

Today with many other options, we stick with MySQL and recommend it to others. There are so many other things that are more suitable for different purposes, and I will have to do research to know more about them. MySQL has been around for a decade, so something cannot go wrong. Its big support communities make it easy to resolve problems since there is always somebody who can help.

I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We use MySQL primarily for internal application systems that we developed.

We use the basic features of MySQL. The interface that allows us to see the parameters of the server is good.

I have been using MySQL for approximately six years.

The stability is fantastic, it has been 100%.

We did not plan to increase the usage of this solution at this time.

We have not needed to contact technical support.

The implementation was simple and took approximately one day.

I did the implementation of the solution myself and I used community support. The support from the vendor costs money.

We are using the free community version of the solution.

I rate MySQL a nine out of ten.

We use it for my clients. Basically any website that uses WordPress uses MySQL, so we use that to manage and run our WordPress websites. Some we have on a cloud, some we have at hosted servers.

It is part of WordPress and some clients are using it for eCommerce, and others are just using it as part of the website to give information.

The feature that I have found most valuable is its ubiquity. MySQL is everywhere, so if I need to find a developer to do things to it that I don't know, it's very easy to find someone who has expertise in it.

In terms of what could be improved, there is not anything that I can think of offhand.

Everything related to automation or improvements are external tools that are brought into it, so it has nothing to do with the robustness of the system itself - it is the developers and implementations that touch it. Those can be improved, but MySQL itself is fine as is. 

I would just say that it could be a little bit simpler to use.

I've been using MySQL off and on for about seven years.

Different hosting systems have different iterations of it. Whenever possible, I try to use the latest version, but usually I'm using a model or two back. But I'm not using the original, not by any stretch.

Everything that works with MySQL is stable. If it's a bug, it's due to the developer who has miswritten a piece of code. The code itself is perfect. It's the application of people who attempt to make changes where the issues come in.

In terms of scalability, I have not done anything bigger than a couple hundred people a day on a site, so I really couldn't tell you about that.

Our clients are small businesses, almost all of them with less than 50 employees.

Previously, and I am talking almost 20 years ago, we would have used Microsoft Access, which is not a relational database and it's not iterative, so you can't have multiple people working on it, whereas MySQL is a system-based database, so multiple people can access it at the same time.

In terms of the initial setup, you definitely need to know what you're doing, but it's not illogical. The database rules and how they work are very clear and concise. To execute MySQL is fairly straightforward.

MySQL is open source so it's free.

My advice to anyone considering MySQL is to check the forums and do your homework.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give MySQL a 9. It would be a 10 if it was simpler to use, but as it is, it's about a 9.

With most open source products we were building, even the language was open source, such as that which employs PHP. This is where the MySQL free version was being primarily used by many of the clients in the storing of their data. 

There have been some great shoppers which we built with the solution. We use the solution to store the transactional data that we receive from various sites or have the data stored in MySQL. 

The solution is easy to use. As the query patterns are very similar to SQL, this simplifies the use and understanding of the solution. 

Integration is a key feature in need of improvement, as we have spent hours building this just to ensure that a set of data is exposed to a different client, a different world in need of that data. Since we are dealing with open source, which we are now employing in memory databases as well, it would be nice if they were to start thinking along those lines. 

I have been dealing with MySQL for around a decade. 

I have found the free version to be stable. 

I have not made use of technical support. 

I was not involved in either the installation or deployment strategy. 

While I was not involved in those projects over the past year, we do have a couple of clients who choose to use the paid, enterprise version of the solution and who take full advantage of it.

While the solution has, nowadays, moved to the cloud, the one I have been dealing with is on-premises.

Even though the solution has not been off the market, I do not possess the exact figures of those making use of it. It is still being used by a couple of our clients. 

I would recommend the solution to those interested in using the free, stable version of the solution which incurs no licensing costs. 

I rate MySQL as a seven out of ten. 

I use MySQL as middleware to get the extracted data from the database. I work with MySQL as an administrator to set up the whole platform. And I document the recipe for setting up the MySQL database.

We are working with the latest version.

SQL is just a relational database. It is open source. It's pretty good. I have been using it for a long time.

Because I am the middleware guy I'm not the SQL database administrator. If I have any issue with it, I'm going to contact the right person. Sometimes, not because the version is not the latest version, there are some issues with it. Sometimes there's an issue with the server which creates issues with it. Then, when the administrator checks the status and makes notes, it works normally and the problem is fixed. With a big company you are not going to work directly with the MySQL database. We are the end user and not the administrator of the SQL database.

For MySQL, in terms of the usage or as the end user, I don't have much to recommend, as long as the query latency meets your requirements, it will be great. Otherwise, it's the horizontal scalability and you get more parallel in the implementation in terms of the SQL database regardless of the usage. This is probably much better than the vertical in terms of scalability.

I have been using MySQL this year.

If you are working in the cloud platform then you do have scalability because the cloud platform is usually AWS or GCP, and they provide this kind of scalability. If you get some issues with the query and latency or something like this, that is an issue of scalability and you can just adjust the horizontal or vertical scalability to meet your requirements.

But the company I was working with was a very big company. It's more than several thousand people and they usually have a lot of data that they are going to store in the MySQL database. They gather the data from the SQL database and then transfer it like ETL and you get data from all the different distributed systems and then put them into the centralized MySQL database. After that you're going to visualize this kind of data so that you can use the Power BI or that kind of tool to generate reports or to create a dashboard for the system. This company had its platform on-premises, but right now they are moving these technologies to cloud. That's why I'm talking about the scalability in two different ways cloud and on-prem.

For technical support, I'm the end user so I extract data or visualize the data from the SQL database. I didn't get too into the daily maintenance of the database.

The initial setup for the SQL database is not complex and it even integrates into the platform. You set up the recipe and then just follow the build book. Then it works as long as you follow the procedures.

Regarding the price, because it's the open source they have different licenses. Even for open source there's a license for the enterprise. I don't think it is expensive. Also for the scalability in the cloud, the price is based on the usage, such as, how much data you transfer.

For the best usage right now, the trend is to move the platform from on-premise to cloud. Then, you you really have the best flexibility to scale down or scale up based on your usage. You can make full use of the resources and then pay for whatever you use. Because if you have it on-premise you always pay the same price no matter how much usage you have. So one of my suggestions is if you plan to set up the platform for MySQL, it would be best to go directly to the cloud solution.

On a scale of one to ten, in terms of the usage for the middleware team and the end user of the SQL database, I would say it's around an eight at least. I cannot say from a  database administration perspective.

To determine what would allow me to give it a 10, I would first have to get more experience using it on the cloud version.