Your web platform runs on an Oracle database? You must be Nuts!

This is the first blog post in a series designed to assist companies who wish to migrate their code from Oracle to MySQL.

During the World War II “Battle of the Bulge”, General McAuliffe said to the German forces who asked for his surrender: “Nuts!” The rest is history – he won the battle, and the allied forces won the war.

Some things are like that. So absurd that “Nuts” is the only possible reaction. And frankly – running your web infrastructure on an Oracle database is one of those things.

Now, the pricing issue is very well covered. Just see here. And for most people, this should be enough. We had a customer migrating from a 7M USD environment to a 200K yearly environment (licensing and support) – definitely worth the migration hassle!

But it’s not just pricing. While my DBA friends might kill me for this, MySQL is actually better than Oracle when it comes to modern environments. The main reason is that Oracle RAC sucks when it comes to scaling writes, while MySQL has tons of scaling alternatives out there (ScaleBase, of course, is the best one, but you’ll be surprised to see that other solutions exist). And writes are what modern applications are all about. Your application stores everything, since everything might be useful. Reads come from the cache anyway.

But Oracle RAC sucks when it comes to write scalability. All the nodes in the Oracle RAC cluster chatter with each other about locking rows and physical storage blocks – so the more writes, the more chatter, the more network data explosion – killing your scalability.

Yeah, I know the SalesForce story.  They have the largest Oracle installation in the known universe. But frankly, SalesForce is not your regular web application; it’s an enterprise application in a SaaS mode. Gaming, web, mail, social – any modern, consumer facing app, just can’t work with Oracle. And how many SaaS companies have the deep pockets that SalesForce has for paying Oracle? (After what Larry Ellison did to Marc Benioff, I wouldn’t be surprised if SalesForce just switched to MySQL or Postgress).

Oh, and Oracle RAC doesn’t even work on virtual environments, so no RAC in the public cloud – probably the most popular environment for web apps these days.

So if your database doesn’t scale, what good does it do for your web application? None.

You pay more – and get less. And almost nobody does that anymore.

In the following installments of this blog I’ll discuss how to migrate from Oracle to MySQL, on both code and experience levels.