Ask Slashdot: Which OSS Database Project To Help?

DoofusOfDeath writes "I've done a good bit of SQL development / tuning in the past. After being away from the database world for a while to finish grad school, I'm about ready to get back in the game. I want to start contributing to some OSS database project, both for fun and perhaps to help my employment prospects in western Europe. My problem is choosing which OSS DB to help with. MySQL is the most popular, so getting involved with it would be most helpful to my employment prospects. But its list of fundamental design flaws (video) seems so severe that I can't respect it as a database. I'm attracted to the robust correctness requirements of PostgreSQL, but there don't seem to be many prospective employers using it. So while I'd enjoy working on it, I don't think it would be very helpful to my employment prospects. Any suggestions?"

Find better prospects?

[anchovy_chekov]

I've used Postgres commercially for years, with a number of employers. It's a great DB and having dealt with MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, et al I'd never go back - though the softies tell me that SQL Server is much better these days.

I'd be surprised if you can't find plenty of work using Postgres. Maybe it's one of those things people don't feel comfortable talking about - like Delphi in the 90s. Plenty of people used it, but few would own up to what made up their "secret sauce".

If you are an active member

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are an active member committing to a major database's code, then it will help your employment prospects no matter what. If you're committing to PostgreSQL regularly, that's strong evidence you are good at what you do.

Re:Video

[JonySuede]

Oracle

Re:Post is troll for a video

[DoofusOfDeath]

I didn't mean it as a troll, but thanks very much for pointing out that some of the video's issues are fixed in MySQL 5.x.

Re:use mysql

[Waccoon]

I was looking for an easy way to automate character conversion from Latin-1 to UTF-8 for the forum software I use. I found out the hard way that the built-in MySQL recoder is completely broken, and will barf in different ways depending on which version number of MySQL you are using. No errors or warnings during the conversion for any version. You'll just find out later that all the field limits are wrong. You can only find out if it worked or not by inserting new rows and finding out if you get errors about data being too large to fit in the field, and whether it fails or not has nothing to do with the actual length of the data, but with whether you send 7-bit or 8-bit characters.

I gave up trying to get MySQL to do it, and wrote my own conversion tool.

And that's just for baby stuff for a web forum on a personal web site. I can only imagine what MySQL is like in an enterprise environment.