Open Source Database Underdogs

implex writes "Interactive Week had an article called "Data Underdogs" which they compare offerings of present Open Source Databases with present commercial offerings. In one part they mention ...On the other hand, MySQL developers now have a much-needed transaction management system: NuSphere last month made its Gemini transaction manager for MySQL available as open source code on mySQL.org, a site that the company recently launched. Complicating matters, though, is NuSphere's blood feud with MySQL AB, a Swedish company that runs a competing open source development site for MySQL code at www.mysql.com. No mention of the fact that MySQL AB actually created the product was interesting."

Comments

One thing the article didn't mention . . .

[micromoog]

The article mentions that the extreme complexity of database management systems is a barrier, which is true. There is one other thing the commercial vendors have that is a big challenge for the "underdog" OSS vendors: trust.

Companies keep everything on database systems. Hundreds of geek-hours must go into the design of a database application for a company. Whatever system a company chooses, they must be reasonably sure the system will:

• almost never fail
• be supported by a stable company and
• integrate well with other systems, into the future.

A smaller price tag may be a good start to target smaller companies that don't rely heavily on database applications, but the reason Oracle can charge $15k/CPU for 9i Standard: the reputation is worth it.

Re:growing trend..

[duffbeer703]

SQL is not SQL

There are four tiers to the SQL-92 standard, and even commercial RDBMS vendors to not conform to all of them.

Oracle, Informix, DB2, MySQL all have different optimizers and differing concurrency schemes. Oracle does not lock a row for reading when another transaction is writing a row. Informix will perform table scans on certain queries where DB2 will not.

This "growing trend" you are talking about must be coming from inexperienced programmers working on trivial or single-user applications. In REAL-LIFE the security of data and usability of the client are paramount.

The fact that you would even say that MySQL and Oracle do the same thing displays your complete lack of knowledge regarding what modern commercial database products are capable of. Leaving all the programming logic in the hands of applications developers re-invents the wheel, escalating costs while introducing more bugs into the system.