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.

Comments

I wonder

[BadHaggis]

One can only hope that they will be using this to replace the database that comes in Open Office.

Re:I wonder

[goose-incarnated]

One can only hope that they will be using this to replace the database that comes in Open Office.

Seconded, thoroughly - in addition I would like some decent gui tools for single-user data-storage requirements; it's annoying that any pc user who wants to maintain a list of (contacts/friends/must-see-movies/must-read-books/etc) puts everything into a spreadsheet.

--
Homo homini lupus

?Every man is a wolf?

Re:I wonder

[Meneth]

Seconded, thoroughly - in addition I would like some decent gui tools for single-user data-storage requirements; it's annoying that any pc user who wants to maintain a list of (contacts/friends/must-see-movies/must-read-books/etc) puts everything into a spreadsheet. I like Notepad with a fixed font.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

One can only hope that they will be using this to replace the database that comes in Open Office. Wouldn't SQLite be a better choice for that? MySQL is a bit to heavy for use in an office application. SQLite was designed to be embedded into applications, is quite powerful, fast, and released in the public domain.

Re:I wonder

[ozmanjusri]

One can only hope that they will be using this to replace the database that comes in Open Office.

You can already use MySQL as the database engine for Open Office.

The development environment in OOo (Base) is a database client, not a database engine. Base does bundle the HSQLDB database engine, but even that is just XML tables, and shouldn't be used for anything serious.

As far as the quality of Base, yep it's rough, but it's also brand new for OOo v2. It's being actively developed, and there are plansto use it to allow users to share data from several FOSS packages within the suite.

* Btw, I know you were just trolling, but I thought this was worth an answer, since desktop databases are a badly misunderstood class of software.

Re:I wonder

[MBGMorden]

The problem, from an IT department standpoint, is that such "lists" always seem to grow in their requirements. We had one department that starting keeping a "list" of incoming data for people applying for land zoning exemptions. All these were handled by a single person and she just needed to keep track of them so the spreadsheet works fine right?

Now, fast forward a year. People from 3 other departments need access to an always updated copy of this list. One of them is off-site on a different network. Some people aren't supposed to see parts of the list. Others can see all of the list but they are only supposed to be able to change parts of it.

Now, as you can see, what this has evolved into is essentially a multi-user database app. A very basic one, but still more than a spreadsheet can handle (because a spreadsheet is meant for calculating, not data storage). If they had just come to us in the beginning we could have gotten something working setup from the start, rather than having to worry about going back and recreating it and importing data.

That's my problem with the whole "a spreadsheet is fine" outlook. You can hammer in a nail with a crescent wrench too, but if you do so with a hammer sitting right there in the toolbox I'm gonna consider you an idiot :).

Re:I wonder

[Shakrai]

I like Notepad with a fixed font.

Notepad is a great storage system. In fact, I have at least ten "New Text Document.txt", "New Text Document (2).txt" files on my desktop right now. One of them has my address book in it.... let's see... is it (6)? Nope, that's my checking account register. Hmm.... could've sworn that was my address book.... shit, I'm overdrawn by $50!

(Laugh, it's not that far from the truth.... got a similar situation with text files in my ~ on my Linux box.... who needs meaningful filenames and directories when you have grep?)

Re:I wonder

[Robert The Coward]

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.

Re:I wonder

[ericlondaits]

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.

Re:I wonder

[jorgeleon]

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!

Re:I wonder

[zurtle]

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.

Why did they buy it?

[LiquidCoooled]

Didn't they know they could just download it and run without paying?

What happens now with Oracle and PostgtreSQL?

[IYagami]

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

Re:Licenses

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if Sun will streamline the licensing madness that MySQL has become... I'm sure that's part of the plan. Streamlined madness is what I've come to expect from Sun.

Jonathan Schwartz's Blog

[sucker_muts]

This is quite interesting news! Check out what Jonathan Schwartz has to say about this:

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/

Re:Licenses

[Martian_Kyo]

mysql license is real mess, it can be interpreted in so many ways.

It would make MySQL easier to deploy...

[hughk]

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....

Re:Sun?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Great news

[Too Much Noise]

Oracle bought both InnoDB and BerkeleyDB. Those still happen to be two of the better engine options of MySQL.

Dificult to say...

[mlwmohawk]

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.

Re:Licenses

[Spy der Mann]

mysql license is real mess, it can be interpreted in so many ways.

Mod parent insightful, please!

I recall reading that MySQL AB really didn't stand a chance to force the GPL (and therefore, move to their proprietary license) on programs that connected to the database because that was "dynamically linking". Dude, WTF? Using protocols to communicate to a program or service is NOT linking! I got so angry when I read the news on the License change, that I wanted to tag the story "greedybastards".
But if MySQL AB told the truth, then nobody would buy their ultra-expensive license.

On the other hand, Sun and their promotion of Open Office (and open formats) is a proper example of Free software.

Let's hope things change for the good (for example, re-releasing the MySQL client software to LGPL or GPL+linking exception).

Great news

[Lisandro]

I can't wait for them to rewrite it in Java!

Re:Sun?

[teknopurge]

Sun is the 2000 version of Bell Labs.

Google just makes beta applications.

Regards,

Re:Rewrite in Java

[LarsWestergren]

Damn it! Now they will rewrite it in Java. It will no longer be the fastest database engine, after the rewrite, it will certainly be the slowest.

Sun already has an embeddable db engine written in Java called Derby. It has pretty impressive features and performance.

Sure.

[hey!]

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