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Comment by reacweb | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting site, but does anyone know why Oracle and mysql have a so poor support of the standard ? It looks as if postgres was the only one trying to comply.

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In oracle's case "poor support" seems to imply being more lenient than required (not needing recursive, allowing qualified names for CTE), whereas Postgres is just more strict.

Which seems to be a general with those two DBMS'...

Have you read the SQL99 or even 2003 spec? No database supports everything. It's a matter which features one cherrypicks. If you want to use lots of XML and ORMs inside your database or use Java as stored procedures than SQL 2003 spec is great. The enterprise grade database software Oracle, DB2, MSSQL and Postgres are all somewhat comparable.

MySQL with e.g. its InnoDB storage engine is very fast and web scale. Whould a materialized view or other advanced features be useful in MySQL? Sure. But it's a tradeoff. And many devs are willing to go with MySQL for websites.

And SQLite is different than the rest too. And then there are a bunch of NoSQL databases for various usecases.

I think you're glossing over some important differences there. Some databases really are more standards-compliant than others, and that Postgres would be more standards-compliant than Oracle or MySQL is 100% consistent with my experience.

For some use cases that's fine, sure. But I've also seen many developers come to regret choosing MySQL when, months or years down the line, they ran into issues that hadn't been apparent at first. And honestly I don't see how it's a "tradeoff" when Postgres can offer performance that's every bit the equal of MySQL.

Ans DB2, typically DB2 is ahead of the game with newer standard SQL.

But that's because IBM has a strong presence in the SQL standard committee and can nudge it to standarise (post-factum) things they already implemented in DB2.

How do you feel Oracle's support for "with" is lacking? I use it on a daily basis, and it seems to work fine for me.

I don't know for MySQL but I'd guess in the case of Oracle is that they have equivalents in their own dialect of SQL.

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