MySQL’s poor performance forced me into writing crazy cache schemes. 5.0 was an unstable hunk of crap. MySQL would barf with random table crashes that would bring down my website. I still don’t understand why a table should randomly crash!

When I finally migrated to a better database system and added foreign keys, I discovered that MySQL’s was happily letting “CoryKING” and “coryking” exist in my unique username column. I had to sift through almost 100 usernames to figure out which account was the real one. Had I been using the new database server in the first place, this issue would have been caught before it could corrupt my database.

Bottom line?

MySQL is overrated. I would not recommend its use in any kind of production environment. There are much better alternatives.