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Oracle Acquires Innobase

Posted by jamie on from the heavy-user dept.

A short time ago, Oracle announced its acquisition of Innobase, the Finnish company that makes the GPL'd InnoDB table storage engine. Among MySQL users, the separately-written InnoDB is almost as popular as the native MyISAM engine, and is considered to be more advanced for most purposes. Slashdot has, except for search, run entirely on InnoDB for the past year or two so we're as concerned about this as anybody. Brian Aker, former Slashdot coder and current Director of Architecture for MySQL AB, comments: "InnoDB is GPL, so once again the beauty of the open source market is at play: there is no lock in, and we can continue to develop Innodb as we see fit. The code is out there and we plan on continuing to support it. The largest database vendor in the world just confirmed that the market for open source databases exists."

5 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. DBMS market going open source? by martenmickos · · Score: 3, Informative


    Is this yet another sign that the DBMS vendors are going open source? This reaffirms our thinking of where open source is going. Great to see Oracle legitimise the open source database space as they did with Linux.
     
    Marten Mickos, MySQL AB

  2. Re:haha! by Z00L00K · · Score: 3, Informative
    The difference between InnoDB and MyISAM is not that InnoDB is better, they are both good, but have different strategies. MyISAm isn't a fully transactional solution, which may be bad, but the advantage is that MyISAM is very fast, which is the key issue in some cases.

    MySQL is also supporting several other databases as backend, all with different advantages and disadvantages.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  3. Re:oy vey by pudge · · Score: 4, Informative

    Slashcode has seen near zero feature additions

    Huh. Just in the last month alone, we've seen the addition of support for CSS and Atom, and the beginnings of a brand-new replacement for formkeys (called reskeys). And that's just September. So, um ... no.

    is widely known to have some of the worst perl code ever written

    Only among people who don't know perl, or Slash.

    is grossly underdocumented...

    True enough.

    But the last thing being true does not remedy the fatal flaws in the other two assertions, which prove you to be quite ignorant about the subject.

  4. Re:A warning to the KDE project? by adtifyj · · Score: 5, Informative

    The KDE project and Trolltech have carefully protected the future of all software developed on top of the Free QT license.

    In the event of a buyout, QT will be re-licensed under a BSD license.

    This agreement was negotiated very soon after Trolltech was formed.

  5. Re:Time for PostgreSQL by Dom2 · · Score: 3, Informative
    To say this shows a lack of real world database experience. Whilst it's simple to change the connection to point at a different database using DBI, once you're actually connected the SQL that you have to use varies in many subtle and incompatible ways.

    Probably the first one that everybody comes across is the difference in the integer primary key. In MySQL, it's auto_increment, in PostgreSQL it's a serial datatype with a backing sequence. If you want to know the primary key value after creating a new row, it's accessed in different ways. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

    Thankfully, because they're all based on a common standard language (SQL), it's possible. It's just still a lot of very hard work. But it's not impossible.

    If it was easy, you'd see many, many more open source projects supporting something other than MySQL (which bugs me as PostgreSQL user :-)

    -Dom