Christopher Browne wrote:
3. I have seen filesystems lost to corruption on all of [JFS, XFS, and ReiserFS], so I have at least vague, anecdotal evidence against their use.
Thanks, this is useful.
4. If you look at ongoing development efforts, you'll find that: a) IBM isn't working all that actively on JFS; they have more staff devoted to ext3 (e.g. - such as Ted T'so) b) Is there anything left of SGI to work on XFS? c) Do I have to say anything about recent happenings surrounding Hans Reiser?
Yes, that did occur to me (the bankruptcy of SGI and the trial of Hans). However I just assumed that there was enough of an open source development following behind each of these efforts that someone would pick up the slack and continue development.
Mind you, by your other decisions, you may have pre-selected some set of risks. It may be that the risks associated with selecting (XFS|ReiserFS|JFS) are not material in comparison with (say) the risks that you have already accepted that are associated with the paucity of data integrity controls within MySQL(tm).
I've been using MySQL continuously for the last eight years, and I have never had any data integrity issues. I really have nothing but good things to say about MySQL. It works really, really well; it's fast, easy to use, straightforward to configure and tune, and its replication rocks. I understand that there are people out there who for one reason or another like to hate MySQL, but all I can say is that for me, it's worked flawlessly for more than 8 years. I have lost data, but every time it has been because of something I did myself (e.g. manually deleting records), not because of MySQL corrupting the tables. I have had indexes become invalid on occasion, but this was easily remedied using myisamchk. Every software package has its warts, MySQL included, but I haven't found the "gotchas" that people like to quote to be in any way showstoppers. In fact, most of the oft-quoted gotchas don't even figure on my radar usually. I don't want this to turn into a MySQL vs PostgreSQL thread, as any discussion that includes MySQL seems to want to morph into that. I just wanted to counter the FUD (and that's exactly what it is, in my opinion, given my own rather extensive experience of using it in the real world). I don't feel I am increasing my "risk" at all by using MySQL; I feel totally comfortable using it, and after eight years I think I have the right to say that without any reservation.
Thanks, /Neil