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MySQL Advantage: "MySQL can be installed very easily"

I've always heard MySQL's popularity had a lot to do with how easy it was to install, but now a days, I really can't see install ease being a factor. The date for the document says February 21, 2014, so they should know about EnterpriseDB and their installer or maybe my idea of easy is different.

In my opinion EnterpriseDB did a really good job with their Postgres installer. They certainly designed it to be easy to integrate with other products, which makes sense, since more Postgres installs means more potential customers.

I was actually taken back by how easy it was to integrate with my products Linux installer. And what makes the installer really nice is, it puts everything in a single directory, which makes all the difference for my product. My product has a Postgres 9 requirement, and I was really worried about losing potential customers who were running Postgres 8 and could not upgrade. But since the install is pretty much self contained, you can happily run Postgres 8 and 9 on the same machine.

If you know Perl and are curious, download my product (http://gitsense.com/download.html) and take a look at the install.pl file. My only complaint with the db installer is, it doesn't provide a way for you to track the install progress. To work around this, I just fork a process which does the db install and I'll print a dot to STDOUT which lets the user know the install is jugging away.



File this under "well that's just your random edge case" but on OS X there have been long standing issues when trying to use 64bit Perl and MySQL:

Circa 2009: http://bixsolutions.net/forum/thread-8.html

Circa 2011: https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=65462

Circa 2014: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3932531

According to this bug report, it seems to come and go over time:

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=61243

This has been really frustrating especially when trying to get newbies to try Perl. Honestly you'd think they'd have a test for this.

My solution has been to use Postgres instead. Postgress.app is awesome. Installing it on Linux (or OS X from source or via Homebrew) is hardly difficult. It's no more difficult than MySQL in my experience.

Factor in the fact I don't need to fix sloppy heisenbugs from the command line after the install, Postgres is a lot easier to deploy.


"MySQL is installed already" would be accurate in the majority of cases.




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