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.)

Comments

I'm sure Oracle's nice and all, but...

[SIGALRM]

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.

Re:I'm sure Oracle's nice and all, but...

[16K Ram Pack]

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.

As I said on newsforge

[suso]

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 sexy

[confusion]

Being associated with OSS and Linux is sexy right now. We're seeing this done in droves - Sun with Solaris, SAP DB, Nokia replacing IPSO with Linux, etc. It's the in thing to do right now.

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/

F/OSS Databases

[I8TheWorm]

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.

Re:Orphanware

[LatePaul]

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.

Oracle v MySQL not fair

[einhverfr]

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.