
Oh jeez
I pray (and I am athiest) to every deity on the planet that the people who wrote the various installers for other Oracle software (those hideous installers written in in Java spring to mind) had nothing to do with this.
IT administrators will be able to deploy and update MySQL faster, thanks to the latest installer Oracle has released to customers. MySQL Installer for Windows can simultaneously download and install all MySQL modules, and it includes an updating mechanism for patching. This is the first time the mechanism has used a graphical …
Weheyy! Yet another method of getting crap on your servers. And this one, by the looks of it, requires a live Internet connection. I can just imagine the friendly little chats with the firewall people. You want to go for that expression on their faces that says: "Why do we even bother?"
Use the operating system tools, you miserable b*st*rds!
Oh, and on Linux, it's "sudo apt-get install mysql" done. Do you *really* think that making your customers click through several screens of happy cheery windows is more user friendly? This is a bloody database server! Your users are not your basic stockbrokers and clerks and receptionists, they are the greasy-haired crowds wearing the "sod off" T-shirts. They do not appreciate their time being wasted with more useless crap.
But thats only apt based distributions. Debian, ubuntu etc.
And you might be suprised by how SME IT works in this regard. Which is where MS seems to have the field to itself.
If something is written that needs a database, its often the developer, or even the user (who might be the same person) who decides. Since the things they are making are often pretty simple and don't need a tuned DB server or any kind of DB admin, this will work fine.
Having a slick little gui to install what they need will make it easier to get it going in that initial decision stage.
So, the firewall people can talk to the sys admin and commiserate with DB admin about how wrong this is. Meanwhile in the 10 man office where none of these people exist, well, MySql might get installed on the office server.
I know exactly how SME IT works. They get a guy in to do it for them.
I only gave one example because I didn't care to give all of them. I only gave the command line example because it's easier and quicker than clicking your way through screen after screen of stupid questions. Even if you are a dedicated point-and-click fan, it's *still* easier to use the one that comes with the OS. Because that way, installing MySquirrel is no different from installing, say, Apache, and you only need to learn one way to install stuff on your system.
Unless of course you are stupid enough to use an OS that doesn't have a native package manager, or one that's so broken that anything someone can come up with is an improvement.
It's been a while but I don't recall the GUI as MySQL's Windows Installer's main problem.
More like the fact that whenever you tried to change any of the data storage paths during installation, the windows service would refuse to start because it got all confused about what was where.
Re-installing (or un-installing / re-installing) wouldn't help either, thanks to all the crap left behind. So off you went to Google to try to find out the magic clean up procedure and the secret installation sequence.
The whole bloody point of a packaged installer is to avoid having to do stuff by hand so unless they've fixed that, prettyfying the installer will do no good.