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MySQL disappointments
Posted by: Bob B
Date: July 19, 2005 07:44AM

Please tell me if there's a big section of MySQL I can't find or something, but as a developer who's trying to migrate from MS SQL Server to MySQL there are some things missing that not only are present in other database systems but also are really staples of application development. For instance, I'm really confused as to why there's no AVG() type function to take an average of values in a column. Meanwhile, there's no support for milliseconds in the date functions at all, which is odd since milliseconds are the foundation of time in the computer world. So I'm sitting here trying to convert a code profiling function that writes timestamps to the database and then later measures how many milliseconds each operation took and takes the average of that to print out for a performance metric, and MySQL just isn't cooperating. I'm also having a hard time finding date/time functions that actually deal with DATETIME data types and not strings. I'm sure everyone's answer is going to be "Too bad, do it in code, calculate averages and parse strings and bend over backwards to accommodate the database" but there's a big performance hit in making thousands of SELECT statements to retrieve values into memory and then calculating the average of them instead of telling the database to do it internally and give me the result. Meanwhile, searching on the forums and lists here (and even on the 'net as a whole) turns up fairly few cases where people even addressed these missing functions. Is everybody else using MySQL for their grocery list or something?

I really want to like MySQL since it's free, open-source and I'm imagining is probably a lot faster than big clunky monopoly-funded databases, but when it seems to be lacking some basic functionality after years of being widely used I can only scratch my head and go "Huh?

Bob

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MySQL disappointments
July 19, 2005 07:44AM
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