Admittedly, those items could be dealt with at the application later, and for that price you got something very fast.
And fast back then meant cheap. Hardware was more expensive than people. It’s reversed now, of course, and we want extra layers and thing to make developers more productive. But back in the MySQL heyday, that was not the case, and I for one am glad something like it was around.
> those items could be dealt with at the application later
That was always one of the arguements, but beyond toy projects or at least beyond a single simple app accessing the DB the application layer is not the best place for that to be implemented.
Maybe I'm anal, but there is a point where giving up correctness for performance feels far too icky to me.
Also those professing mysql to be the solution back then did so with an almost religious furvour that is always troubling, and if something else threatened their messiah such as sqlite beating it in some benchmark by their own terms, ooh there were hissy-fits and claims of witchcraft!
It was the difference between website up or website down.
So, yeah, lots of emotion in that. I only made ad money when site was up, and thus could eat. Such a direct correlation can make you (well, me in this case) a weirdo.
I never talking anything else down so much as give praise to that which saved my bacon.
Cloudflare was another one of those things when DDOSes hit.
And fast back then meant cheap. Hardware was more expensive than people. It’s reversed now, of course, and we want extra layers and thing to make developers more productive. But back in the MySQL heyday, that was not the case, and I for one am glad something like it was around.