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MySQL's Response to Oracle's Moves
mAriuZ writes "I've recently written two articles on this topic for Database Journal, the earlier, written after the InnoDB purchase, entitled Oracle's purchase of InnoDB, their release of Oracle Express, and the effect on MySQL, and the most recent, just after the Sleepycat purchase, entitled Pressure on MySQL increases as Oracle purchases Sleepycat, with more to come. Since I only do a monthly column for Database Journal, and things change quite quickly, I thought I'd post a few more thoughts on the topic."
Oracle's latest "purchases" of these Open Source projects will not threaten MySQL at all. You can't apply for-profit, closed source takeover pressure to OSS code. The GPL prevents exactly this by keeping the source freely available and open.
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Oracle have overinflated revenues and profits based on crap software, and they've been doing it for years.
:-). But crap software? Hardly. Oracle plummeled MySQL into the dust in quality before MySQL even existed. Oracle has had transactions and atomicity since version 6 in the early 1990s, a full and elegent procedural SQL language since around that time, SQL that supports concepts such as subselects and everything else needed so a dba could support a mission-critical company database and sleep easy at night.
Oh dear, looks like we have a MySQL weenie here. Oracle my well be pumping their revenue stream for every dollar they can get, and like IBM their salesmen used to be notorious for turning up for meetings without a price list (it's depends Sir
Oh, and did I mention the support? When I was a dba I knew I could ring support up, at any time of the day or night, and I would get an answer to a question and a fix/work-around for any problem. Truly impressive.
MySQL has it's place and it's useful for many things - although generally as a database it's still pretty crap. Postgres is much much better and is now a serious alternative to Oracle, SQL Server and DB2. But to dismiss Oracle as crap frankly just says in large flashing letters that you've never used a real database for a serious application.
[/snark]
Aside from the low, low price, what gave MySQL the intial jump on Oracle and other 'mature' RDBMS is that it was much faster for simple things. This because it didn't include the kitchen sink of 10 years of "bright ideas" to synergize the enterprise with scalable robustness. You can include in this set of bright ideas, things like transactions (which many complex database applications really can't do without), and things like running a JVM within the database. No one has ever been able to coherently explain to me why it would be a good idea to do the latter (save as some workaround to a convoluted/broken legacy database they don't have the option of fixing).
Sometimes all you need is "SELECT
You are running a production system and haven't even tried to restore the backups you take in order to verify that you can get your company's data back when disaster happens? geezzz...
Talk about doing your job with your resignation filled out and signed. It's just the date that is missing!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
You have to keep in mind that MySQL isn't making money off techies that Get It, they're making money off of Suits. Suits don't want to make long-term commitments to software with a shaky or uncertain future. The fact that these purchases are raising doubts as to MySQL's future is already enough to make Suits (who are already skeptical of OSS) nervous & less likely to send their business to MySQL.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Besides, why would Oracle want to kill MySQL so it can be the de facto back end for SAP? Not only would it not work (as mentioned above) but Oracle isn't really interested in being the back end for SAP. In the long run, Oracle wants to be SAP.
Read my other comments on this topic here and here.
Breakfast served all day!
I can't believe you are seriously arguing the tuning tools on MySQL are anywhere near the ones on Oracle. Oracle has whole tuning libraries, tuning subsystems, autotuning components, performance analyzers.... Just for starters look up "statspack", "Performance report" in your oracle docs and tell me where MySQL has anything like this.
Oh and sending some guy for 2 days is not how you tune a database. You have a full time on staff DBA that works with your development team, understands the data and understands how the system is being used. Oracle 10 does an excellent job of self tuning (again an advantage over MySQL). To beat the automated routines takes time.
Sure lets take a look at them. Name any area of database management. Show me how MySQL or Postgres's tools are in fact better (better in this context means: more feature rich, more powerful, leading to higher utilization rates for hardware).
And I don't care what people need. The point being debated is whether Oracle is "crap" not whether most database users can get away with very low end products. Heck the most commonly utilized database is a list in Word so this point isn't even worth discussing.
The title leaves you looking for MySql's response to the recent Oracle purchases. Can you find it in the first link? Nope, not a single, concrete action from MySql is mentioned, just lots of speculation/analysis. How about the second link? Nope, just more analysis. How about the *third* link, entitled "more thoughts"? Yes, finally! That should have been the first link given in the article, and really the only link he needed to give, since the first two articles are mentioned in the third.
Just because Oracle is looking to purchase MySQL doesn't mean that the product is "enterprise-ready": it just means that Oracle is aware of the market share that could be gleaned by moving MySQL users into its empire. Don't confuse market savvy with technical proficiency; I could cite a list of acquisitions by large companies of companies with inferior product lines, just to capture an additional market segment -- and some of these purchases were made by Oracle itself.
"The fact that these purchases are raising doubts as to MySQL's future is already enough to make Suits (who are already skeptical of OSS) nervous & less likely to send their business to MySQL."
It's easy to spin it the other way. MySQL's future is now guaranteed. They can go with the cheap version now and the Oracle supported version later.
You honestly think that the publishers of the world, willing to publish any rewrite of the manual that they think will sell, would actually say 'oh, the Postgres documentation is so awesome that there's no point to publishing books'??
These guys have been publishing rewrites of fine documentation for years. They don't publish more Postgres books because they don't see enough userbase/marketshare.