Oracle and MySQL -- Good Move or Bad Bet?

sendai-X writes "With the recently announced purchase of Innobase, Oracle has shown it's intention to further support open source. This is key as open source enters the mainstream in business and in light of the success IBM has had with the Eclipse project, and Sun recently looking at purchasing PostgresSQL. What do Slashdot users think about this merger? Is it beneficial to the market and database users by having the largest database vendor openly support MySQL and provide an upgrade path to Oracle? Or is it just another cog in the Oracle machine in their attempt to dominate the enterprise IT market? Will this change the database market landscape? Will it help or hurt IBM and Microsoft?"

Comments

Re:Bad for open source, maybe

[HiThere]

Well, as I understand it, it's not that straight-forwards. InnoDB is licensed as a GPL program as well as under the proprietary license. They could fold the project, but then someone else could pick up the GPL code and fork it. This wouldn't be so good for MySQL's business model, as they wouldn't be able to sell a proprietary DB including InnoDB...though there's probably some complicated thing they could do. The proprietary fork would be just about guaranteed to be a lot more hassle than it has been. The GPL branch of the code, however, would be able to continue essentially unchanged...but perhaps without commercial support...so someone would need to put together a new team to develop the code, which would now be strictly GPL, as the basic copyrights would be owned by someone else, and the only rights to work on the code would be those ceded by the GPL. (Basically, this means that all descendent code would need to be GPL.)

Re:Bad for open source, maybe

[jadavis]

The GPL branch of the code, however, would be able to continue essentially unchanged

By who? Not by MySQL AB. It takes a long time to make a new community work effectively.

MySQL AB is between a rock and a hard place, I think we can agree here. If Oracle cuts off InnoDB from commercial licensing, MySQL will stop developing/supporting it, it's only a matter of time. They simply can't have a GPL version that's better than their commercial version. Then, without transactions or RI, their "enterprise-ness" and usefulness will be called into question.

So that leaves the community. But the community is too wrapped around MySQL AB to function on it's own just yet. That will take time.

And that time is precisely what Oracle doesn't want MySQL to have. If the development of MySQL DB is set back by 12-18 months, that will surely be a victory for Oracle, who will secure a strong lead ahead of the most popular open source database. The wind will be stolen from the 5.0 release, and another few rounds of businessmen will make long-term commitments to Oracle (in the form of licenses and hardware).

What is the downside to Oracle?

Re:Purchase PostgreSQL?

[sco08y]

MySQL itself is largely a langauge parser and a simple and technically inadequate storage engine (for anything where data integrity matters). In other words they don't own any of the foundations of their technologies.

That kind of nuts and bolts nerd attitude is bad enough with mainstream programming (compilers will never be fast enough, shared objects will never be fast enough, virtual machines will never be fast enough...) but it's lethal to DBMS development.

One of the fundamental principles of the relational model is that you separate your logical constructs from the physical implementation. If anything, using other people's storage software was one of the few things they got right! (Of course, the rest of the time they succumbed to the nuts and bolts nerds and talked about how high they could score on arbitrary benchmarks and how integrity was for sissies, &c &c.)

A DBMS is a *system* and when you design such a system you need to step back from the details of implementation and work out a rigorous, mathematically grounded plan for how it is going to work.

Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin

[Vryl]

Larry knows what is going down.

Linux has commodotised the OS. MySQL and perhaps PostGRES are commodotising the Database.

All the money is upstream. Larry's customers are asking him why should they use Oracle, when MySQL et al does what they want. Larry want to sell them his other mojo, and that is where the money is. Why support the database when a bunch of other people will do it for you.

I would not be surprised to see Oracle tech ending up in MySQL, as a gift from Larry.

I too have counted, counted, weighed and measured.

Re:Purchase PostgreSQL?

[GreyPoopon]

MaxDB (SAP AG)

This is most likely the primary reason that Oracle made their move. SAP actively supports MySQL development, and promotes it (and naturally MaxDB) for use by customers who don't need huge enterprise-scale databases. Oracle and SAP are in fierce competition, and Oracle will most likely do anything they can to get in the way.