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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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One can only hope that they will be using this to replace the database that comes in Open Office.
Homo homini lupus
First post!
So now I'm a Sun employee. Interesting. No more BK at MySQL.
What all this means, I'm sure I'll be learning the hard way very soon.
Interesting surprise! I wonder if Sun will streamline the licensing madness that MySQL has become...
ilovegeorgebush
... I think. Are these great news? It's hard to know in which direction will big companies move. But if Sun keeps it's current track, I would say these are great news.
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
Right now Sun supports PostgreSQL on Solaris (http://www.sun.com/software/products/postgresql/index.jsp) and Oracle is one of the main applications used in Solaris.
I think this is a move to sell support to their customers, like asking: "Do you need an Oracle Database?"
- If the answer is "YES", then we will sell you our servers and OS support
- If the answer is "NO", then we will sell you our servers and OS support AND MySQL / PostgreSQL support
There is a very good entry on a Sun blog about the cost of propietary databases and the "commodization" of this market:
http://blogs.sun.com/jkshah/entry/cost_of_proprietary_database
Read the subject.
...
I thought SUN was currently bundling postgresql guess that wasn't good enough...
So up for discussion why buy mysql?
* Well you can't buy postgresql.....(Who to buy?)
* Wanting to hurt redhat
* You get ownership of the code (Since mysql has)
The "hurting redhat" is more for journalists "lets find a conflict thinking"
What else are the reasons?
still reading?
screw google. hard to find a more evil company these days (ignore their 'newspeak' nonsense about not doing evil. those that know about google and haven't been inducted into 'the society' know about google and avoid it like the plague).
;(
sun hires older workers (disc: I work at sun). when I interviewed at google, though, I was the oldest 'grey hair' in the whole cafeteria
then, see the brian reid story to confirm all this evilness about google.
please think twice about parotting the 'google is not evil' mantra, because I assure you - if you are over mid 30's, they will either not hire you OR fire you before you are about to vest. quite evil.
so I'm glad its not going into the hands of google. they have enough power and are corrupt enough, already.
(really, go search on brian reid - it may turn your view around about 'the beloved google'). sad to say, but it is true.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Yeah, I remember the 'Sun DB' remark. I expect we'll see a Sun-branded version of MySQL (SunSQL? MySunDB? StarSQL? OpenSQL.org?). I also expect to see Sun packaging MySQL with OpenOffice.org, with smoother OOo Base integration.
My blog
Could you fill us in? What low blows, and what transactional engines were removed? (Not being stupid, I'm just ignorant to what you're referring to...)
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
But I think most people thought Sun might push PostgreSQL which is a nice database. Not sure why Sun would purchase MySQL, seems like an expensive PR move. I for one have seen Sun's product support deteriorate over the years, and hope they keep support for MySQL independent of the main line support. Or maybe this plays into Oracle as Oracle had or has an alliance with Sun. Is this alliance strained?
It's a bit odd considering how much effort Sun put in to pushing PostgreSQL on Solaris in the last year or so. I wonder what their goal in this acquisition is.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Perhaps Sun will be playing around with open sourcing some more of their hardware as a pseudo way of moving away from hardware, without actually losing all their hardware aquisitions.
But it is interesting to see how open source as a business model is evolving by allowing competitors to leverage off each other and still compete. Maybe what we are looking at is the "horizontalisation" of the market, I note that with speculation about an open sourcing of DB2 and Oracle databases, Microsoft's position in the market looks more and more isolated every day.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
As a long term PostgreSQL proponent, I'm not sure this is good news or bad. Many of the software stacks in open source, regrettably, use only MySQL. This makes it hard for PostgreSQL at times, but it puts the "owners" of MySQL in an excellent position to help some projects while ignoring others.
Sun owns Java. Sun will soon own MySQL. If you have a Tomcat/J2EE environment running open source, you will soon be having to deal with a single vendor with control over your environment, because most systems only give lip service to PostgreSQL but fully support MySQL. Expect the support bills to go up.
On to RedHat and IBM, I think it is time for them to start funding the PostgreSQL project for real. Setup a more corporate entity to guide it and REALLY compensate the guys like Tom, Bruce, et. al. for so much hard work, which IMHO is above and beyond a standard pay check.
This means that now more people may prefer to use MySQL rather than Oracle with Java, as they will see it as the most "compatible" database to be used within Java.
I have been a die hard postgres user for about 3 years and this news scares the crap out of me. Sun has been using postgres as a backend option for Solaris log functionality and they contribute to the project regularly. My fear is that postgres will be discarded in favor of the shiny new toy
they hired brian and then fired him just before he was about to vest. they gave some cock and bull story about 'being too old fashioned' but if you knew brian (and I actually do) then you'd know this was a total blatant lie.
its not about not being hired - its about their hiring CRITERIA and retention methods. seriously, this has surfaced a few times and its not exactly a secret anymore.
I feel I dodged a bullet by not going there. who wants to work like a slave and then be fired right BEFORE you vest. evil!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
When I talked to some Solaris guys about MySQL, I had nothing but grief from them about it. They kept hyping up postgresql. Now I wonder if I log into that forum now if they shall change their tunes any.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Doesn't Slashdot use MySQL on the backend? Doesn't Google use it for some stuff?
Might it have been more fair to say "PostgreSQL scales better then MySQL" then "MySQL doesn't scale well"?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I am delighted that the second best Unix flavour has bought the second best open-source database.
The argument that is basically summed up by "No one got fired for choosing IBM" is why so many companies bloat beyond control. It really is an act of laziness and cowardice.
A good CTO or engineer can research and understand the risks and benefits of using specific technology. A better CTO puts in place risk mitigation, i.e. grow internal talent to handle the new technology.
Having been in the CTO position, and basically following my own advice, I saved my DotCom startup almost $1M dollars on license fees and support contracts. Yes, we went out of business because the business model was flawed, but our technology was on target, did much more than it was expected to, and worked fantastically and because of these steps, we had an extra year that we wouldn't have had otherwise.
This is why small companies are the most innovative.
Here's one that I've noticed, and which other database professionals I've talked to have corroborated. Access, when executing a query against an outside database, sometimes confuses an unique constraint as a candidate primary key. This seems like a teeny little quibble, but it has really bad consequences.
Consider the columns (a,b) and the value (a = X, b is null). If (a,b) is part of the primary key, the value (X,NULL) cannot occur in a table. But the idea of "uniqueness" is not as well defined in relational theory. Can the values (X,NULL) occur if (a,b) is constrained to be unique? Well, probably. Can it occur more than once? Now that turns out to be a very interesting question.
Let's consider a single column (s), where s is defined to be unique, but is allowed to be null. (s) cannot be part of the primary key of course, but can null occur more than once in the table? The answer is, yes, for both practical and theoretical reasons. The practical reason is that this turns out to be a quite useful behavior. Suppose s represents a social security number on a person record. In some cases that person has declined to provide is SSN, in which case we must put a null in that column. So two or more people can provide null for their social security number, thus many rows can have null there; but if two people provide the SAME SSN, that's an error.
The theoretical justification for nulls behavior in unique constraints comes from that fact that the expression (null == null) should evaluate to false. The expression (s = null) is ALWAYS false, even if the column s happens to contain null. That is because null as a value has special meanings; it can mean "doesn't apply" or "don't know". If s is the SSN, and record a and record b both have null in them, then how do we interpret the expression (a.s = b.s)? If it means do the records for a and b have the same value in column s, you'd want it to be true. If it means does person a have the same ssn as person b, you'd want it to be an error. If it means is person a known to have the same ssn as person b, you'd want the answer to be no. Each of these interpretations has its justifications, but the last one is the one that is ultimately the most practical. If we want to test whether a column is null, we must use the "is" operator, not the equality operator.
So, the apparently minor distinction between key candidacy and uniqueness is quite large if any of the columns involved are allowed to contain nulls.
Now, for the practical consequences of getting this wrong. If you use Access' GUI tools to build queries against tables in an external database, Access when running that query does not allow the external database to optimize the query. You need to do a pass through for that. Instead, Access attempts to optimize the query itself, particularly I/O over the database link, which is presumably expensive.
So lets say table p is people and table r is region, and both tables are held on an Oracle database. I want to do a query which joins person to region to make a table of names and the regions they live in. Now it happens that Alice (person #25) and Bob (person #82) live in the same region, "North". The query correctly spits out ("Alice","North"), then continues on to Bob's record. Now it turns out that both Alice and Bob have refused to supply the SSN, so they both have null in column s.
What happens next is pretty mysterious, but I think we can infer two things. First, Access gets the issue of (null = null) wrong; at least some parts of Access do some of the time. Second, Access may be attempting to reduce external I/O, but it somehow tracks by what it thinks is the primary key. Whatever the cause, one often gets the sequence:
("Alice","North")
("Alice","North")
instead of:
("Alice","North")
("Bob","North")
which would be the correct one.
Oops.
I'd give you more information on reproducing this, but I don't use Access much. Like I said, I have talked to other da
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This may be a bit of a problem. Sun is focused on Java enterprise bloat. Check out anything from them. It's all "professional scalable turnkey enterprise business solutions that create synergy, empower your enterprise, discover business logic, optimize cash flows and convert visitors into customers". Everything they do is inoculated with more worthless business-speak than source lines of code it has, their Java enterprise platform is an stinking overengineered piece of bloat based on a failure of a language that manages to combine the disadvantages of imperative programming with the disadvantages of object oriented programming (note: not that it's a remotely good OOP language), and none of the advantages of functional programming. Their business strategy is to confuse, bloat and make you insane, and you know how Java projects go. A 5 men Java project that goes on forever can be done by just a Python programmer, if you quit all the enterprise crap and know how to program (using a proper language).
MySQL 6 is in the forge, but what's in for MySQL 7? Java for MySQL? Having to cope with half of the Java enterprise bloat and twelve paragraphs of business-speak nonsense just to get it working?
They did this for two reasons:
1. Oracle's pricing per core is hurting Sun, as they have processors with many cores and Oracle licenses cost a fortune to Sun's customers ($150000 for a Niagara processor). MySQL prices per server.
2. To break LAMP and try to attract as many gullible fools as possible to Java. PHP, Python and Ruby are going up and Java is going down in popularity. The problem is they can't buy "LAMP" out. So they buy what they can and try to screw it up. The smarter people will replace the "M", but some may attempt to replace the "P". While on it, maybe they can get the "L" replaced too.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Sure, but excessive normalization can also be a pain in the arse. Theoretically speaking, complete normalization throughout would obviate any need for NULL. Practically speaking, this is unreasonable, given the resulting complexity and increased time required for queries and other operations -- which is why databases still use NULL. As the GP noted, allowing NULL values "turns out to be a quite useful behavior."
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Question: Does your mom effectively use MS Access now?
.MDB file format is not very good, it is good enough (something for what Microsoft is characterized). However there is no other GUI good enough for users such as my mom (unless you count Excel)
The answer is Yes. But of course the answer depends on what you mean by "effectively". My mom uses access effectively for her needs. She can start a database with one of the wizards and then modify it a bit using the GUI. She has a *very very* small knowledge of keys and tables and overal database structure (which I taught her). Overall, she knows whatever is necessary to know to acomplish her tasks.
The idea of a GUI is to make it easy and intuitive to execute certain tasks. Access does that quite well, even if the
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Very bad translation and it simplifies a very broad issue.
/else/ in the chain of work is putting more hours in than they are being granted in pay. So sometimes it's as much about caring for your fellow colleagues as it is being a 'chump'.
Working unpaid overtime is agreed in the contract at the start, at least here in the UK - whether legal or not in EU laws, you accept it. Some jobs I've accepted that as I've enjoyed the job enough to choose to do overtime for my enjoyment, knowing that the project wouldn't even get off the ground if it weren't for more-time-invested-than-is-money-in-the-pot. This type of work especially applies to advertising where the client doesn't have the funds but you want to produce, regardless of their funds, something really fantastic for your own pleasure/portfolio/learning. Some jobs I've refused unless overtime is paid in full - it depends on the nature of the work but it doesn't make you a chump to spend more time on a product than you're paid because you know career wise (CV, portfolio work) it will pay dividends.
If you feel so strongly about unpaid overtime, don't sign a contract saying that you'll do it for free.
As a manager of a coding team I have always made it extremely clear to project managers that they are getting no overtime out of my team unless the team consent to it or the accounts team agree overtime pay. I'm all for defending teams and readily do so and discourage overtime by quoting realistic deadlines, so this way if they choose to work overtime, they're not 'chumps', they're just keen on the work.
It's also worth noting that in the past I have worked overtime because someone
It's amazing how some people on Slashdot seem to have a cube mentality which suggests that work is a sterile, non-interactive environment. It really isn't in my experience.
Web-hosting of sorts, would be my quess. I don't mean hosting like dreamhost. I mean more along the lines of utility computing. Sun won't just sell web-space, sun will work closely with it's clients.
Sun has been going open source lately. To make money in F/OSS you sell services, not products. Sun has also announced that sun will be outsourcing their data centers. I think Sun means to expand their data centers a lot, and wants to save money.
A lot of major companies already contract with Sun to run database apps on Sun servers. Those servers are located in Sun's buildings. Sun then contracts with EDS to do the hands-on administration of servers. EDS often contracts with other companies, including a lot of off-shore companies. The datacenters do not have to be offshore, just the people who monitor the systems, and do all the admin work that does not have to be hands-on.
I think Sun may be targeting smaller company, not just banks and the like.
So let's say I want to start a SaaS company to offer hotel management software. Since I don't have a lot money, and I don't want to pay for a lot of computer resources, to get started, I decide to use PHP and MySQL to develop my product. Since this is a commercial offering, I will need to have a commercial version of MySQL, this is where Sun will have me covered. Sun itself will do very little, Sun will contract with other companies to provide back-end support. Sun will hold the licenses to the OS, and the database, and maybe the language - if you decide to use Java. Sun will be the middle-man, the deal maker. Sun will change it's focus from selling hw/sw, to contracting for sevices, and those services will be provided by others.
Or something along those lines, is what I'm guessing.