The Chronicler's Web (TCW)

by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 7 February 2010 @ 13:20 UTC

MINNEAPOLIS, MN - Research was conducted to determine a Database Management System (DBMS) that is currently available, and that is prominent in today’s market. This research also investigated a DBMS that has the ability to evolve in order to meet the changing conditions of increased complexity of applications and services that are delivered to mobile devices, such as laptops, tablet PCs, palmtop computers, mobile telephony handsets, and PDAs. The DBMS that was selected and recommended for consideration was the MySQL database for its overall cost, reliability, performance, and adaptability in the changing database market environment.

Introduction

This study was performed to determine a DBMS that was suitable in meeting certain criteria imposed by Dr. Apiwan Born of Capella University who chartered this analysis. The DBMS that was selected and analyzed because it met the criteria was MySQL. This DBMS selection was based on the criteria of availability, market prominence, and its ability to adapt or evolve in an increasingly complex database market environment.

Background

Database Management Systems stemmed from research conducted at IBM and the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s. This development was triggered by escalating costs associated with deploying and maintaining complex systems. By 1998, leading database researchers concluded that DBMS were becoming too complex for programmers to handle and that automated configuration and management solutions were necessary. Within two years, Chaudhuri and Weikum (2000) proposed the rethinking of database management architecture to allow for  greater modularity, which is a powerful tool for managing the size and complexity of applications and systems, enabling the application and data management capabilities to seamlessly interact; and greater configurability, which, unlike the architectural mechanism of modularity, is concerned with adapting the runtime environment mechanism of the database. These sentiments were echoed by Stonebraker and Cetintemel (2005) three years later when they cited specific examples of DBMS where the architecture was no longer appropriate. Hence, database modularity and configurability figured prominently in those DBMS that would inevitably survive the increasingly complex DBMS landscape through their ability to adapt to the changing needs of the market.

Distinguishing Features of MySQL & Its Prominent Market Position

MySQL is the world’s foremost opensource DBMS due to its consistent fast performance, high reliability, and ease of use. MySQL is used on every continent of the world by web developers, including some of the world’s fastest-growing organizations, such as Yahoo, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia, Google, YouTube, and Zappos.com, to power their high-volume websites, business-critical systems, and packaged software. MySQL is the database of choice for developers who develop applications using LAMP (Linux, Apache Web Server, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python) technologies. This DBMS runs on over 20 separate platforms, including Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, HP-UX, and IBM AIX, giving MySQL greater flexibility in the market and allowing its users to have more control (“MySQL :: Why MySQL?,” 2010).

Some distinguishing features of MySQL that other DBMS may not have are: (1) Multiple storage engines allowing the user to choose the most appropriate engine for the application being used, (2) Native storage engines, (3) Partner-developed storage engines, (4) Community-developed storage engines, (5) Custom storage engines, and (6) Commit grouping, which allows multiple transactions from multiple connections to be gathered together to increase the number of commits per second (“MySQL – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,” 2010).

MySQL provides reliable and affordable high-performance tools, servers, and connectors to cost-effectively implement solutions that give organizations a competitive edge. Industries where MySQL provides these advantages include: (1) Biotech, (2) Communications, (3) Content and Workflow Management, (4) Education, (5) Enterprise 2.0, (6) Healthcare, (7) Network Management, (8) Retail, (9) Security, (10) Small & Medium Businesses, (11) Travel & Hospitality, and (12) The Web (“MySQL :: Industries,” 2010). Among the leading industries that use MySQL to increase revenue and secure a competitive edge in the market are: Alcatel, Nokia, Suzuki, Axfood, Yahoo, Technorati, Sabre Holding and Lufthansa.

MySQL is the most popular DBMS in the world with over 65,000 downloads per day. MySQL continues to be the choice of many database developers, DBAs, and IT managers due to its affordability, high-performance, reliability, and ease of use. A July, 2008 Market Update on Open Source reported by Forester Research, stated: “MySQL has the highest adoption and growth. MySQL continues to have the largest mindshare in the open source database market and has the highest number of paying customers for product support: an estimated 16,000” (“MySQL :: Market Share,” 2010, p. 1.). According to data gathered from several client surveys by Evans Data Corporation, a vendor-neutral third-party research organization, MySQL has gained 25% of the market share in overall database use by developers over the last two years (“MySQL :: Market Share”). And a July 2006 JoinVision study, Open Source in the Fast Lane, “IT specialists indicated they deploy MySQL 30% more frequently than Oracle, SQL Server or DB2” (“MySQL :: Market Share,” 2010, p. 1.).

Ability to Evolve & Adapt in a Changing Database Market Environment

MySQL made its debut in 1994 when it was developed by Michael Widenius and David Axmark. From its initial release in 1995, MySQL has evolved for use in Windows platforms in 1998, and has gone through at least five more versionings before reaching its current MySQL 5.0 version, currently on the market (“MySQL – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,” 2010).

The predominant means whereby DBMS’s illustrate their ability to evolve and adapt in a changing database market environment is through benchmarking (“MySQL :: Benchmarks,” 2010). MySQL has demonstrated its ability to adapt and evolve over time as the database environment has become increasingly more complex. This is supported by its benchmarking results over the last several years. For example, in June, 2006, the evolution of MySQL 5.0 helped to set a world-record benchmark for the Java Application platform, Java Systems Application Server 9.0, and the Solaris 10 Operating System through its participation in Project Glassfish (“MySQL :: Benchmarks”). On November 6, 2008, two Sun Fire X4150 servers running MySQL, OpenSolaris, and the GlassFish application server posted the best Open Source result on the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark.  MySQL further demonstrated its ability to evolve and adapt in an ever-changing database market environment by consistently scoring among the top database performers for throughput and scalability. MySQL has adapted over the years to be used today for some of the most demanding, high volume, business-critical applications with companies like Associated Press, Cox Communications, Google, Lufthansa, MIT Lincoln Labs, NASA, Sabre Holdings, Yahoo and others. MySQL scales to deal with billions of rows and terabytes of data making it suitable for a wide range of transactional and analytic applications (“MySQL :: Benchmarks”). As of November, 2008 Kickfire and Sun led in price performance at the 100GB and 300GB benchmarking levels as determined by the Transaction Processing Performance Council-H (TPC-H), which tested Kickfire that runs the MySQL database (“MySQL :: Benchmarks”).

References

Chaudhuri, S., and Weikum, G. 2000. Rethinking database system architecture: Towards a self-tuning RISC-style database system. The VLDB Journal: 1-10. http://www.vldb.org/conf/2000/P001.pdf.

MySQL – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (2010). MySQL Distinguishing Features. Retrieved February 6, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL#Distinguishing_features

MySQL :: Benchmarks. (2010). MySQL :: Benchmarks. Retrieved February 6, 2010, from http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/benchmarks/

MySQL :: Industries. (2010). MySQL::Industries. Retrieved February 5, 2010, from http://www.mysql.com/industry/

MySQL :: Market Share. (2010). MySQL::Market Share. Retrieved February 5, 2010, from http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/marketshare/

MySQL :: Why MySQL? (2010). MySQL::Why MySQL?. Retrieved February 5, 2010, from http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/

Stonebraker, M., and Cetintemel, U. 2005. One size fits all: An idea whose time has come and gone. Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Data Engineering (April). http://www.cs.brown.edu/~ugur/fits_all.pdf.