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MySQL To Be Ikea Of The Database Market
Rob wrote to mention an article discussing MySQL's intent to become 'the Ikea of databases'. From the piece: "While new entrants into the open source database market, such as EnterpriseDB and Pervasive Software, have made no secret of their intentions to chase Oracle's market share, Mr Mickos said MySQL is happy to leave them to it. 'We are thankful that they are there to define the market, there is no product if you're the only vendor,' he said. "Pervasive and EnterpriseDB are going up against Oracle. We don't want to be in that space, we don't want to take the heat from Oracle. If you're working in a zoo you don't want to be the one who has to brush the teeth of the lion.'"
Yes, Windows brought MySQL to me.
I host my site on a commercial service, and previously I was stuck with using Access as my DB, unless I wanted to pay big SQL Server bucks. My site crashed 5 or 6 times a day because of the load on the database.
Finally my hosting service started to offer MySQL, for free...
My site stopped crashing, and now everything loads a lot faster. (I haven't converted the entire thing over to MySQL, but enough to stop the crashing.)
If MySQL were not free, I would not have converted. If it were not on Windows, I would not have converted.
But now I see it as a real possibility for use at work.
No reason to lie.
I'm a PostgreSQL fanboy, but I hope these guys pull it off. A lot of poeple don't realize that what's good for one open source project is good for all of us (historical emotional baggage aside).
The 5.0 release looks to be the biggest in the history of the database. I say good luck to them. Has anybody played around with their functions implmentations?
Why all these crappy slashdot posts about MySQL we have been seen lately? They speak as if MySQL where an uncontested champion in the free-software database arena. This is far from true. Many articles doesn't even mention PostreSQL. Many of them says "Now MySQL is a big player because it's got... transactions" (!).
I think there's interest here in building up the idea that MySQL is important. There's currently no reason to use MySQL, because other products already do what it does and better.
It's not the PG installer, it's the fact that Windows is now part of the official release that matters.
Still, though, mindshare is a considerable issue. There's a lot more people familiar with MySQL admin and it's quirks than Postgres. And, a lot of F/OSS uses MySQL as a data store by default. While it is not uncommon to have both PG and MySQL as a choice, if there is only one choice out of the two it is more often MySQL than PG, although counterexamples are sure to exist.
It will be interesting to see how these two projects evolve with respect to each other and how they end up positioned in a few years, now that a lot of the "first cut" elimination criteria have been eliminated (e.g. no subqueries/triggers for MySQL, no official Windows support for Postgres).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.