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How Real Is The Open Source Database Fever?

Posted by timothy on from the something-to-sell-you dept.

J. Misael G. points out a NewsForge article on recent moves by some database vendors to loudly release (some of) their products as open source, asking the vital question "How much open source beer are these newcomers bringing to the database bash, or are they simply coming in and asking where the cups are?" (Slashdot and NewsForge are both part of OSTG.)

12 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. I'm sure Oracle's nice and all, but... by SIGALRM · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Oracle Vice President of Technology Marketing Robert Shimp, whose company is among the only database providers not trending toward open source in some way, was critical of some open source moves by database makers
    Of course he would say that--but the typical consumer interested in F/OSS databases are definitely not the handful of big companies that Oracle sends a team of slick salesmen to do 4 months of PowerPoint just to get one > $100,000 sale. Of what use is the "Oracle model" to the rest of us?

    Mr. Shimp, get a clue... we're simply not going to buy your pitch without looking at other decent (free!) alternatives.
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    1. Re:I'm sure Oracle's nice and all, but... by dsplat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      He was also critical of "orphanware". While there are reasons to be critical of orphanware announced as if it is a live project, it has some benefits. It is certainly possible for a product to reach a point in its lifecycle at which its residual value to its owner is small, or even negative if support is continued. However, at the same time, it may still be valuable to a small group of customers. Releasing it as open source at that point permits customers to make other arrangements for bug fixes and even new features.

      Let's not pretend that orphanware is something that it's not. Nonetheless, there are still reasons to be pleased to see it.

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    2. Re:I'm sure Oracle's nice and all, but... by tanguyr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think most "typical" Oracle customers are much less sticker-price sensitive than you'd think, since they realize that the cost of developers and DBAs you need to actually do something with your shiny new DB usually far outweighs the cost of the software. If anything, Oracle wins a lot of business in the db world just like Microsoft wins a lot of business in the productivity suite world: most corporate customers think "Database" = "Oracle" and never really go out there to investigate the alternatives.

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    3. Re:I'm sure Oracle's nice and all, but... by 16K+Ram+Pack · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Let's be honest, some products that are OSS'd may be an old pile of junk making nothing for the company. And they see that releasing it gives them some kudos in the OSS community.

      So what? There's still some more source code added to the big pot marked OSS. Someone, somewhere may be able to take it and do something else imaginative with it.

    4. Re:I'm sure Oracle's nice and all, but... by (H)elix1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Of course he would say that--but the typical consumer interested in F/OSS databases are definitely not the handful of big companies that Oracle sends a team of slick salesmen to do 4 months of PowerPoint just to get one > $100,000 sale. Of what use is the "Oracle model" to the rest of us?

      One of the areas Oracle shines is the developer support. While not free as in speech, they already make their product free as in beer for the folks doing development work. Granted, you pay the piper when you move to production land, but one of the strong points for the OSS offerings is not having to hork about with licensing on the dev side. I know I have used Tomcat and Jboss on the dev side while a customer noodles through the decision to get BEA or IBM kit.

      I'd say Oracle might be in a world of hurt on the lower end database solutions. Light weight stuff that might have required a 100k license in production land and needed the sophistication of a ten column MS Access database is numbered. Many of the OSS solutions are 'good enough' for department scale use. An interesting move on IBM's side was donating Cloudscape (now Apache Derby). They salted the field for the lower end stuff, but were clever in they used DB2's JDBC connector. Build a simple app, find out it grows into the enterprise, and you have the option to pay the same mad cash as Oracle for the full featured solution....

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    5. Re:I'm sure Oracle's nice and all, but... by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There's also the fact that Oracle has a real, proven track record of reliability and scaliblity. There are bunches of companies that run huge Oracle databases on mainframe-supercomptuer hardware that can't ever be down, not even for a minute, and have done so for years.

      Can something like MySQL do the same? Well, I honestly don't know. However if you are in a position where there will be extreme losses from an outage, you don't want to be the one to test and maybe find out that no, indeed it can't.

    6. Re:I'm sure Oracle's nice and all, but... by arkanes · · Score: 3, Insightful
      MySQL absolutely cannot compete in the market where Oracle shines. However, Oracle is used in a lot of places you don't need it. On the other hand, once you've spent a million dollars on an Oracle installation you may as well use it for everything.

      Disclaimer: I'm a MySQL hater and wouldn't recommend it in any circumstance. Postgresql on the other hand is fantastic and should get a lot more love than it does. It still can't compare to Oracle in the huge installations, but it can certainly replace Oracle in all sorts of common usage.

  2. As I said on newsforge by suso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think a lot of it is PR. If you take a look at a lot of the advertisements that include the words open source, they use it like a buzzword. It gives me a kinda woozy feeling that I don't like.

  3. codekeg by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm not as interested in their Open Source beer. I want more of their Open Source speech - not just all the marketing hype we can eat, but shareable code, code, code. I want Postgres transactions in MySQL APIs. I want Oracle's scheduler in Tomcat's JVM. I want to pay them for tech support, so I can get my FrankenBase to work, making me rich, and everyone else wise. Free the source, Larry!

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  4. Database is a commodity now by johnjaydk · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The overlooked fact of this whole discussion is the fact that databases are becomming a commodity. Using object-relationa mapping tools like Hipernate you can completely hide the details of the underlying database from your code. This enables you to use whatever database is on sale this week and even change your mind mid-stream.

    This makes it really easy for open-source databases to step-in since there is no lock-in. Later on if you figure out you need a big honking Oracle/DB2/whatever you can easily change your mind.

    Like Java makes the OS and HW a commodity these tools makes the database a commodity and by definition commodities ends up being really cheap. And it's kind of hard to find cheaper than free ;-)

    My favorite play is to develop on Hypersonic/McKoi and deploy on PostgreSQL. No sweat.

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  5. Perspective from an Oracle professional by jgerry · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Warning: I am an Oracle DBA. I have been working as an Oracle DBA / developer for 10 years.

    I absolutely believe that the open-source database choices out there today (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sleepycat) are more than adequate for 90% of all development being done, especially the small- and medium-scale stuff. I'm glad that we've moved away from flat-file systems for small-time web work. It has forced developers to understand their data structures, which is a huge step forward for everyone. Developers today have a far greater understanding of their data, and databases in general, than they did 10 years ago. They understand relational models better, they understand abstraction better. That said: there are two things everyone should understand about the way Oracle thinks about databases (and its customers):

    1) Oracle exists solely to serve the top end of the market. They're not really interested in anything else.

    2) If you can afford it, it pays to start with Oracle first. For small installations, it's not as expensive as you think, especially if you forego the support. Why do this? Because if you find out later that you needed a serious database solution and need to make a back-end change from something like MySQL, you are in for a world of pain.

    This is Oracle's bread and butter. I don't expect to be hurting for work for a VERY long time.

  6. Re:That's why you should NOT use oracle by jgerry · · Score: 3, Insightful

    very public open sourced death

    Not very likely. And not a very good idea either. Until you show me something in the open-source world that can do 1000+ transactions per second, with complete atomicity, and ability to pull the plug on that system and then seamlessly roll it back to the exact moment in time that it was at when it died... Well, you're not replacing Oracle with anything less in the enterprise space.

    By the way -- the "painful" part of converting from an OSS database to Oracle isn't the data conversion, export import, etc. That part is dead easy. The hard part comes when you start customizing your solution to take advantage of some of the huge performance-gaining features that Oracle provides. You have to start figuing out what parts of your application-layer code can be moved to your database, and making those changes at the second and third tier accordingly. You can create massively fast, very complex database systems with Oracle, but it's a very specialized area.

    I'd be all for complete transparency of database from any application, but when you do that you encourage, no, you force, the least common denominator solution.