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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
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 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
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