MySQL in production environments

[UncleBensSauce]

Hi All

I've seen quite a lot of MySQL in production projects recently, mainly for collaboration systems, webservers etc. Though nothing where it seems to be mission critical. I was wondering what peoples feelings are with regards to it - specifically to dataloss, failure rates, corruption etc.

I'm currently examining Nagios and have noted that a lot of the addons/plugins use MySQL, I'd class monitoring as a mission critial part of our IT department and i'm worried about moving to a monitoring system that depends on MySQL. All our reports, capacity planning data, system alerts etc will be in this DB and after having read so many horror stories I'm reluctant to move to it. We'd be using multiple managers for redundany so I'm sure we'll get some protection there, but the system has to be rocksolid stable for a sign-off for production.

Any thoughts/comments on this - Am I way behind the times - Does MySQL cut it in production environments and systems with a lot of data and a reasonably high rate of change?

Is postgress a better option?

 

[UncleBensSauce]

Thanks for all the input - feel a little bit better about putting forward a system that depends on it now

You'll want to do some kind of replication and/or clustering if the data is very important. ZFS is also worth investigating.

As I understand it ZFS is only available on BSD (zfs not quite production ready) and on Solaris/OpenSolaris (Can't go this route until we know what Oracle will do)

Are there any other platforms that support zfs? I'm a big OpenSolaris fan and use it as my home OS and on my own webservers - unfortunately EU has decided to slow the Oracle deal down even more, and I can't submit a solution with products that may not be around in the same way/price as currently (anyone else expecting opensolaris/mysql support to go up an price a lot?)

Currently leaning toward a BSD on x64, failing that CentOS instead.