Reasons Not to Migrate from Oracle to MySQL
Oracle Database Better Than MySQL for Larger Enterprise Databases
© John Wu
Nov 16, 2009
Although many IT environments running Oracle can run fine on MySQL, those with large databases and complex architectures should think twice before attempting to leave Oracle.
The first thing for IT executives to consider is what business problem is being solved. Does it require clustering or replication that MySQL can't do? Does the size of the database or its future growth exceed what MySQL can do?
These are questions IT management needs to answer before picking a solution.
Advantages of MySQL over Oracle
By using MySQL, IT executives can use funds that would have been used in Oracle licensing to reinvest in other areas of the business. In some instances, migrating to MySQL makes a lot of sense. Many businesses would be better served by moving to MySQL if they're not utilizing features in Oracle not found in its open source competitor. Can the database be migrated to MySQL without any loss to functionality? If so, money is being thrown away staying with Oracle.
TCO Advantages of Using Oracle
As an IT environment grows, the business begins to push MySQL to its limits. For example, the replication and clustering in MySQL are nowhere near as robust as Oracle's. Subqueries are poorly optimized in MySQL.There is no external authentication for MySQL other than its insecure internal username and password database.
Even with brilliant IT employees capable of working around MySQL's limitations, it comes down to a question of how employees are used. Should IT employees be looking for new ways to keep customers happy and grow the architecture? Or should IT employees be inventing band aids to make open source software work to avoid a capital expenditure?
Total cost of ownership (TCO) is not just licensing and tech support contract costs. It includes everything to keep the IT environment running, as well as the cost of any downtime incurred. Here is an example of how TCO works:
An Oracle license costs $150,000 on a server. In an environment with Oracle RAC, the total hardware and software costs would be around $360,000 including a separate standby site. Although this is a big number, amortize this cost over 3 years which comes to around $13,000 per month including interest.
This is the same cost as employing just one senior IT engineer.
Now, consider the cost of time staff spends on band aids to make a large database work with MySQL every month. If the IT organization spends more than 40 hours per week keeping a MySQL solution going, Oracle's TCO starts looking very good despite costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If a business is suffering performance issues on the free solution, is it really free?
IT decision makers reading this article may be interested in reading about choosing a Windows virtualization solution as well as choosing between Apache Tomcat and Weblogic.
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