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Re:"How hard can it be to implement?" by vog on Wednesday September 08, 2010 @05:43PM (#1673618)
This is not necessarily about whether the denormalized database structure is appropriate. It is more about:

Why the h... doesn't their ORM, or even better their database, already take care of cascading updates?

Why does it have to be implemented manually for every code that updates something? (... which is of course expensive and prone to errors)

Re:"How hard can it be to implement?" by gaius on Thursday September 09, 2010 @12:37AM (#1674423)
Exactly. I can imagine that they thought they were being very clever using ORM + MySQL instead of writing SQL to run on a more mature RDBMS. Well, decisions like that often result in you painting yourself into a corner. There's a reason that MySQL is free yet people still pay for Oracle...
Re:"How hard can it be to implement?" by vog on Thursday September 09, 2010 @05:18AM (#1674852)
I was not thinking of Oracle here. PostgreSQL is free software and offers almost everything you expect from a real database.

So I guess the main reason people pay for Oracle is because they only know about MySQL and not about PostgreSQL.

Re:"How hard can it be to implement?" by gaius on Thursday September 09, 2010 @08:46AM (#1675125)
You're probably right. I've never understood why Postgres has such a small mindshare. Between Postgres and SQLite, there ought to be no ecological niche for MySQL to exist...
Re:"How hard can it be to implement?" by jemfinch on Thursday September 09, 2010 @11:07AM (#1675609)
MySQL does (did, at least; Postgres has been improving) replication better. Replication is really important for high availability, which almost everyone needs.

The irony, of course, is that a single Postgres server is frequently (IME) more reliable than multiple MySQL servers even when the latter is setup for HA.

Re:"How hard can it be to implement?" by vog on Thursday September 09, 2010 @07:45PM (#1677368)
In addition, replication is the next thing where PostgreSQL is vastly improving (according to their road map).

Also note that if you want to trade some of the ACID properties for better performance and replication, the so-called NoSQL databases (CouchDB etc) seem to be a better trade-off than, say, MySQL with MyISAM instead of InnoDB.