Databases

So I'm sitting here, having spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to get at some data in the application we use to manage our catering service sporadically over the course of the past two days. My plan was to simply install an odbc driver, fire up a data transformation services package and to dump everything into a mysql database. However, this has proved not to be quite the trivial task I anticipated.

This brings me back to a question I ask myself fairly regularly: Why oh why on earth does anybody use databases other than the big boys or something open source?

I know that some apps are tied to bad legacy choices, but I still don't get it. This particular application "upgraded" to Sybase's Advantage database server. I say "upgraded" because it seems like a very bad choice to me. Here's why:

• It probably cost them some money to buy the developer's license and it definitely cost me money as the customer. Mysql is free. Across the board.

• Although Sybase has odbc drivers, mysql does too. And they work better with everything I screwed with today. (SQL server dts, access - eww, crystal reports - eww.)
• What's up with this "data dictionary" nonsense? Can't you just give me a host name and credentials to connect to? I don't get that one either.

I could ramble on longer, but it would probably run the risk of making me sound dumber than I have already made myself. Here's my plea: If you're writing an app from the ground up or if you're re-architecting it, use a database which doesn't suck.