Wednesday, February 6, 2008

It's the Data, Stupid!

Search for the phrase on Google and you'll get plenty of results.

After reflecting for a few days on reaction to MySQL, I think I've realized what is at the heart of it all. Data.

Application developers are not stewards of data. They believe that to be the job of the DBA.

Someone recently asked one of our architects what features of MySQL convinced them to choose this as our new database engine. It's open source!

Of course, that makes perfect sense.

Can it connect to Oracle?

I don't know.

Our architects are made up primarily of former application developers, be it web or client server apps. Data was never that important...

They are currently driving our tool set to favor the application developers, which makes perfect sense to them. It's all about the interface.

But it's not. In the health-care industry, data is king. For any industry really.

I've been trying to convince everyone that this million dollar piece of software called Oracle is not just a bucket, it's feature rich. Streams, Queueing, all kinds of really cool tools. According to our DBAs, none of that stuff is used.

No wonder we're moving to MySQL.

So my quest is to convince the powers that be is to stop wasting money on our million dollar buckets and use them to their full capabilities.

If you have any information to help in this fight, links, slideshows, whatever, please send them on to me (myfirstname.mylastname@gmail.com), please!

Help me turn the tide back to Oracle, back to the data!

1 comment:

Saager Mhatre said...

Hang on a minute, haven't we done this before? I wrote on Dratz's blog and mine in response. And then, you pinged me back... so, why are we doing this again? :P

Anyway, I think my comment to your previous post cover a lot of my sentiments. I share your (and Tom's) intentions. It just seems to be worded wrong when you just say 'data'. We need to clarify what we mean when we say 'data'. (refer comments to Tom's post for details, just too tired to repeat all that :S)

BTW, I also remember doing this with Tom Kyte.