Comming across Robin Schumacher’s “MySQL on Windows? Absolutely!” i have some stuff to say
First, I absolutly LOVE windows on my Desktop, and i LOVE Linux on my servers, and i have nothing against windows servers or Linux Desktops, i like Operating systems that get the Job done faster and with least effort, so what suits a job suits me, having never used a mac, i would jump to a mac if they tell me it can help you develop application X faster, why not, but the article here http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql_on_windows.html does not seem to make sense to me. Here is why
In the comparison of number of downloads, it clearly reads that windows has 600K downloads VS linux that has 200K downloads, but are you serious ?
On Linux, MySQL is hardly if ever downloaded from mysql.com , while on Windows it is always downloaded from MySQL.COM and therefore i beg an explanation on why you say this statistic tells anything, Also, most developers are like me, they use the Windows edition for development on there development PCs, and then deploy the actual application on a Linux server.
For example, on a debian system i would simply issue
apt-get install mysql-client mysql-server
this will get MySQL binaries from Debian, not from MySQL, and therefore making the statistic not available to you.
Then the article talks about how insignificant the differences between the Linux and Windows edition is, to tell you the truth, this is not the case at least for me, here are SOME examples
Most of my applications can not make good use of RAID because RAID does not help with disk seek time (And therefore latency), My answer to this is usually separating tables to more than 1 hard disk , and although having databases moved to other hard drives is supported in windows by creating a text file, moving individual tables on windows is not, On linux, i simply create a symbolic link to the MYD file, and one to the MYI file, i can even split a single table to 2 hard drives with the indexes on 1 drive and the actual data on the other.
Clustering anyone ??
For a longer list check out http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/windows-vs-unix.html , this is certainly is inferior to the Linux counterpart for something like a shared hosting environment (See number of open files and connection timeouts etc..)
Now to add more to that, Linux is a free OS, you install and upgrade it for free, and MySQL is also free, if your business uses many many MySQL servers, your savings on Windows Server licenses can be significant.
The bottom line is, when a company like Oracle (Since it has acquired SUN) gets hold of an open source database engine, you can rest assured objectivity will still be there only when it supports the paying product.
Thanks for listening.