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How Real Is The Open Source Database Fever?
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.)
Mr. Shimp, get a clue... we're simply not going to buy your pitch without looking at other decent (free!) alternatives.
Sigs cause cancer.
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.
It's to make it clear that the relationship exists, and allows you to consider if there may be some sort of conflict of interest. For example, when MSNBC does a story on Microsoft or NBC, they always point out that they're operated as a joint venture between the two.
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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make install -not war
I don't see how it is going to pan out in the long term for some of these companies, though.
Jerry http://www.syslog.org/
Other than the obvious mySQL and PostgreSQL, I have tried two others... CA's Ingres and IBM's Cloudscape (which is an embedded DB).
Ingres was originally intended to compete with the likes of Oracle and MS SQL Server, but never had the power or client base. OpenSourcing Ingres looks like CA's attempt to beef up both in one shot. It's not a GPL license, just a chance to peek at the source and maybe help out. The interface that ships is very much like Oracle's.
Cloudscape is nice, but not even as powerful as PostgreSQL.
I think there is a huge market still untapped for open source DB's... especially RDBMS, but alas, large companies are (of course) slow to adopt.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
The late-1990s media buyouts created so much cross-ownership that every article can contain some hidden corporate bias, stemming from competition/cooperation between parent corporations publishing the story, and the subject of them. When the same corporation is reporting on itself, the story is extremely suspect. The media response has been to favor "full disclosure": mentioning the corporate connection in the story as a disclaimer of "objectivity".
It's not good enough. People are increasing our acceptance of this conflict of interest the more we see it, rather than rejecting it more as it grows more pervasive and therefore more dangerous. Actual competitive conflicts are necessary to get critical interpretations, not just acknowledgement that interpretations might be selfserving propaganda. At least Slashdot has these discussions of stories, in which dissent can be communicated. My favorite system was the P2P "Third Voice", a browser plugin which let the user attach popup sticky notes to any web page, stored in a DB the plugin checked against the "background" page's URL. That way, P2P commentary could effortlessly appear right in the context being presented, without requiring cooperation from the provider of the target content. The project folded, but I welcome its return. Only the flexibility, complexity and scale of the public is enough to compensate for the advantages that centralized corporate media has in lying to us.
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make install -not war
From the article:
> PostgreSQL has a much richer feature set but
> has scalability problems and doesn't have
> a company behind it providing
> enterprise-level support;
Bah. What about this? Lots of companies there, and many of the folks involved are core PostgreSQL developers...
The Army reading list
<Off-topic rant>the editor of Newsforge really needs to have a word with the author of the article, I say. It is really not necessary to write "so-and-so said" in every single sentence, says me. I say that you only need to mention who said the words when the author/speaker changes. I say that it is very annoying to read that article because of the poor way that it is written.</rant>
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
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.
All my foes are spelling or grammar Nazis.
"nazi" should be lower-case, since you're using it as a generic noun and not a proper noun. (Spelling or grammar Nazis would be german-language, anyway.)
Ingres and Cloudscape are clearly orphanware where CA and IBM clearly saw no need for the database management systems.
I work for CA in Ingres support. I can tell you that that statement is absolutely untrue. Every CA product that requires a repository or database of some kind either already uses Ingres or is in the process of being ported to use it. It's ridiculous to suggest that we'd 'abandon' software that's going to be at the heart of virtually every other product and service we sell.
MySQL is not really designed to do anything more heavyweight than lightweight content management (a SQL interface for NFS basically). It has data integrity issues which IMO should even rule it out of e-Commerce altogether or anything else where accuracy of information matters.
THese include:
0000-00-00 is a valid date in MySQL
NUMERIC types are agregated as floats which can lead to round-off errors.
Numbers are truncated if too large to be stored
(Strings are also truncated in violation of SQL standards, but this is not as severe as numbers for obvious accounting reasons).
If MySQL is unable to create an Innodb table, it may create a myisam one instead without raising an error. This creates a situation where you cannot be sure that your transactions are really being rolled back everywhere the application thinks they are rolling them back........
Now, PostgreSQL has no data integrity issues that I am aware of, and the few areas where it handles things in non-standard ways are clearly documented, and the core developers place a huge amount of thought into how to do things right. The level of professionalism in this project is truly amazing.
Firebird is nice too, but PostgreSQL has fewer limitations. These two databases are building the track record you speak of and they will continue to do so. Now with Slony-I, PostgreSQL has a decent, robust, and open source replication solution, I will expect continued interest in this area.
Oracle still has a few enterprise features that most of the open source databases lack-- table partitioning, grid computing (but investigate backplane if this interests you), and a few other options. However, on the down side:
VARCHAR's store NULL's as empty strings (which are not the same thing)(!!!)
PostgreSQL has much more flexibility in development due to the larger number of supported languages for stored procedures.
$$$
Licensing headaches....
Disclaimer: My company (http://www.metatrontech.com) provides solutions for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Firebird. We will work with Oracle and SQL Server but it is not as much our things since we have an open source focus. We have been running PostgreSQL extensively and have only had problems due to hardware failure.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP