My colleague has been a MySQL fan since day one. He loves the fact that it's free and open source and could never quite understand why anyone would spend tens of thousands of dollars on something else.

But then again, he has never really had an interest in understanding; data management just isn't his "thing." Thankfully, he readily admits this and stays far, far away from anything to do with databases, leaving all of that "stuff" to the experts. No less, he'll still cheers whenever there's a MySQL "victory." it is, after all, free and open source.

Data professionals have traditionally relegated MySQL as a "toy" relational database management system (RDBMS). Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly suitable for blogs, message boards, and similar applications.

But despite what its proponents claim, it has always been a non-choice for data management in an information-system. This is not a criticism of the "free open source" aspect of the product, but of its creators.

The MySQL developers claim to have built a reliable RDBMS yet seem to lack a thorough understanding of RDBMS fundamentals, namely data integrity. Furthermore, they will often surrogate their ignorance with arrogance. Consider, for example, their documentation on invalid data [emphasis added]:

MySQL allows you to store certain incorrect date values into DATE and DATETIME columns (such as '2000-02-31' or '2000-02-00'). The idea is that it's not the job of the SQL server [sic] to validate dates.

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