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Sun Buys MySQL
Krow alerted me that MySQL has been bought by Sun. Right now there is only a brief announcement but it discusses what the acquisition will mean for the core developers, community etc.
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Will it blend?
Not that I distrust Sun's motives when it comes to free software. I mean they did a stellar job on OpenOffice.org, didn't they?
My blog
mysql license is real mess, it can be interpreted in so many ways.
I have worked at a lot of big banks. Open Source has been slowly finding its way in, but it is incredibly difficult to deploy an open source database like MySQL or Postgres. The banks says they want safety and security - and you answer that your database isn't enterprise critical so why pay for Oracle? Management then says, ah well, how about MS SQL Server....
See my journal, I write things there
Short version - Oracle offered 19.23 or so, and BEA said yes this morning. Big impact on a lot of Java EE developers out there.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Sun is the 2000 version of Bell Labs.
Google just makes beta applications.
Regards,
Website Hosting
Hopefully they are starting to realize the real value in offering software virtually for free but charging for the support. You get a lot more regular paying customers if they can pay a very affordable annual cost for continued support vs paying some stupid high software cost up front. Many opportunities are missed because of the sticker shock for SMBs.
MySQL is already ACID. Unlike PostgreSQL, MySQL supports several storage engines - with InnoDB, DBD and Cluster providing ACID. MySQL has indeed supported ACID, subqueries and such since 2005.
It's disheartening to see these kinds of posts get modded as insightful in 2008. Aren't we supposed to be dynamic, informed folks?
Stop the brainwash
ESR was on the nail. You can't defeat open source by buying the company IF the product has enough people who care about it enough to maintain it, have the appropriate expertise and aren't employed by the company.
There are a lot of important open source projects for which at least one of the above requirements is not true.
This is why IT departments need some improvement. Most are made up of hardware people who have a few programmers as friends and by and large are reactive rather than proactive in the way they deal with growth. The worst are the massively corporate entities who assume that the way to deal with any issue is to micromanage everything. I'm not blaming the people in IT for this so much as the people who create and staff IT departments.
How do you deal with the growth of an application such that it no longer is able to serve the audience that it now has effectively? Well, if this were hardware, you'd replace it. And the same approach needs to be taken with software. But that takes people to understand the application, and others to do the time consuming work of migrating people and data over to the new application.
There's nothing wrong with using a spreadsheet to manage an address book to start with. As more people start to use the same source, however, IT departments need to be willing to (and CTO's willing to allow them to) recommend changes, including providing the resources to move the data to a more efficient, more effective, platform. As of right now though, most IT departments don't even have the appropriate people to do that.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
the benefits are only there on the surface.
but what good are they if you are bound and 'forced' to work until 9pm each nite? or made to feel guilty if you DON'T stay for dinner and work a few hours after that.
all for the SAME PAY.
yes, its a slave life. you'll understand that when you get older (no insult intended; I didn't realize this until I hit over 40, myself.)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Spoken like someone who doesn't work in IT. I get request the day stuff is suppose to start with the users IDEA of what should work. Not requirements or information and what needs to be done then I get weeks of little issues tiring to make this Square Peg fit into a round whole until I figure out what is going on and replace it with something that works. The problem is IT is the last step in the process not the 1st step and that will always cause issues. Sometime we just can't do what the user thinks is simple. Just this week I had a issue with someone deciding that email made a good real time alert system from an external customer. Problem email isn't real time and/or reliable. So every hick up in email is an issue. If IT was consult we could have either a)set the expection or b)developed sometime that was real time and reliable they could use.
Actually, from my experience as a programmer I'd much rather have someone come with a spreadsheet he worked with for a year, and very specific requirements such as "we want some people to be able to see these fields, some people to be able to edit these columns" and so... than to have someone with a vague notion of what he needs and then turning that into a relational database. Even if spreadsheets seem awful, a year's user experience with a fast prototyping tool (i.e. the spreadsheet) is priceless.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
PostgreSQL has 7 -core developers, one of those works at Sun.
While Sun didn't buy any of the PostgreSQL companies, they do provide support and developers - the same as the others.
I doubt their support of PostgreSQL will lessen any.
The two database communities are not comparable.
MySQL is run by a central company.
PostgreSQL is run by the community, with companies growing up around it offering additional features and support (of which Sun is one of them).
What will happen is MySQL, the company, is shut down?
This I don't know.
I do know what will happen if the companies around PostgreSQL go away?
Its happened before. - PostgreSQL continues.
If anything from my point of view this is better for MySQL.
It stops companies like Oracle from being able to control the only company that truly controls MySQL.
Who needs meaningful filenames and directories when you have grep?
Actually, he has a point.
One of the best features, to my taste, of gmail is that I can quickly find an email with a specific content regardless of the subject. Same thing with files if they are full content indexed.
And that is the way that humans naturally work: "I know what I am looking for, I just don't know where I put it (nor I care where it was)". The folders and file names paradigm is an emulation of the paper archival model. Classes are tough on how to create a mantain one (bookeeping, library, secretaries).
You see, this "order" force us to keep to pieces of information in our head: What is it and where is it. And to use one to get the other.
Of course anyone can create a simple filing system, but it requires some level of self disipline to keep it.
And is not intuitive.
I know what I want... just fetch it!
Spoken like someone who's just entered high school.
The last people anyone wants to talk to about ad-hoc projects is IT. An employee has a need, they fill it with a reasonable tool. Per the GP post, the initial requirements were simple and the solution sufficient. No IT department needed. As the utility of the system increased, so did the requirements, and so must the solution space expand requiring IT assistance. IT should then be eager to help and congratulatory on the success of the solution to date.
It's impossible to divine the future requirements of any system, or even it's success. That's why we iterate.
Actually there is stil an immense use for Excel in data processing. As a mathematician, I find Excel excellent for very-short-term data analysis projects. If you need to put the data in a database... you can always dump the whole spreadsheet.
Excel generates graphs very quickly, has quite a powerful set of numerical analysis functions and just works.
Databases aren't the answer when you want fast results.
Couldn't stand the weather