MySQL Founder Monty Quits Sun (Or Not)

Paul Boutin writes "A reliable source tells Valleywag that MySQL inventor Michael Widenius, better known as Monty, has resigned from Sun. Sun bought Monty's MySQL company in a billion-dollar deal last January. Brian Aker, who forked the Web 2.0-friendly Drizzle SQL database (and former Slashdot engineer!), remains at Sun." Kaj Arnö and Sheeri Cabral share their thoughts.

Comments

Please use this thread to do the following:

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Tell us how great your database is, (ie. postgres, mssql server, oracle etc..)

2. Tell us how shitty mysql is in your eyes.

3. Tell us how mysql "sold out"

So everything under this thread can be modded as "redundant"

Thank You.

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[DanWS6]

4. For extra credit tie into your rant how terrible you believe PHP is and how xyz is so much better.

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[LWATCDR]

Now now. PHP is a pain but a dang useful pain. Just like MySQL.

PHP and MySQL are both good but not great tools. What makes them useful is all the stuff that works with them.
I would drop MySQL in a second for Postgres except that too many CMS and other packages use it. The same is true of PHP.

There happy now?

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[man_of_mr_e]

My database is great, mysql is shitty in my eyes, and mysql has sold out.

Is there a prize?

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[DanWS6]

No.

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[LWATCDR]

Okay Mr. Cranky Pants.

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[danieltdp]

Yes. A 'reduntant' mod.

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[Kjella]

Tell us how great your database is, (ie. postgres, mssql server, oracle etc..)

I'd rather tell why I think databases in general suck: Lack of standardization. It's one thing if you could do like with browsers and make compatibility chart with ANSI SQL, but it's choking full of proprietary extensions. Hopefully they'll sooner or later get around to supporting SQL:2003 which takes care of the worst ones. Here's one example, creating an unique ID:

The standard specifies a column attribute of:
GENERATED ... AS IDENTITY (non-core feature ID T174+T175).

PostgreSQL doesn't support the standard's IDENTITY attribute.
DB2: Follows standard, albeit with some restrictions on how identity columns may (not) be added to an existing table, etc.
MSSQL offers IDENTITY as a column property, but with a different syntax (not as intuitive and with less options) than the standard's specification.
MySQL doesn't support the standard's IDENTITY attribute.
Oracle doesn't support the standard's IDENTITY attribute.

And they bloody well all have a way of doing it, it's just five different ways. That's what I hate about databases, you don't pick one for RDBMS features but because you need to pick a language. It's like picking a computer because of the compiler. They seriously need to get the standards *ahead* of the implementations, like for example browsers and HTML/CSS standards. Or at least get a reasonable subset standard so you can write a non-trivial database neutral application.

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[Kjella]

But after you have finished the definition phase (programming) you can use the database in a quite standard way with SQL (executing).

Says someone that can barely have finished SQL for dummies. You can't even select the first ten rows in a standard way. FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY? ROW_NUMBER()? TOP 10? ROWNUM = 10? LIMIT 10? And if you're designing anything non-trivial you'll want things like triggers that can't be written in plain SQL (no, T-SQL, PL/SQL, pgSQL etc. are not plain SQL). Please tell me you don't design databases for anything. If you do please tell me which company, so I can stay the hell away from it.

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[Rich0]

Couldn't agree more. My other big pet peeve is applications that are database-specific (which obviously is related to the fact that app designers don't have much choice in the matter). I don't want to install my own MSSQL server for the sake of the one application that can't run on my company's enterprise scale server farm running some other RDBMS. I don't want to pick a different application that doesn't meet my user's needs simply because it handles the other RDBMS.

Oh, and if we actually had some standards perhaps there would also be a chance that every time Oracle releaes a new software releaes it wouldn't break half the applications I manage...

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[iron-kurton]

They seriously need to get the standards *ahead* of the implementations, like for example browsers and HTML/CSS standards

*cough*IE*cough*

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[Splab]

Well since the siblings seems to agree with you, I'm going to disagree.

Yes standards are nice, in theory you can pick any single database you want for your project.

However, in the real world different databases excel at different things. For instance SolidDB trades features for speed - no other database performs like their in memory option (while staying ACID); MySQL is great for being a dumb advanced storage engine for stuff you want to save, but aren't critical, they gain speed by relaxing the constraints checks.

If all databases where to implement the full specification all databases would suck donkeyballs - like everything else you pick the tool for the job at hand.

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[shutdown -p now]

Probably the main reason why apps are database-specific is precisely because databases tend to have very different SQL syntax when it comes to reasonably advanced queries. Also, the difference between snapshot semantics of transactions in MVCC implementations (Oracle, Postgres, Firebird), and lock-based ones, can lead to some very annoying bugs down the line eventually.

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[shutdown -p now]

Using sequences (CREATE SEQUENCE and NEXT VALUE FOR) is considered preferrable to IDENTITY, anyway, but support for ANSI SQL sequences is also rare. IIRC, if you use the very basic syntax, you can get the same DDL/DML running on Oracle, Postgres and Firebird, and that's about it.

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[Rich0]

Yup. Hence the reason I posted that in a discussion about the need to standardize SQL... :)

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[discogravy]

lol ur still using xyz?

Re:Please use this thread to do the following:

[adavies42]

AFAICT the SQL "standards" are simply the superset of everything Oracle and DB2 happened to be doing the year the standard was finalized. I tend to use them as examples of how not do make standards.

Shoot

[XanC]

If I'd just made a billion-dollar deal for my company, I'd sure look long and hard at not working anymore.

Re:Shoot

[Anonymous Coward]

Does your crystal ball tell you that?

Re:Shoot

[sm62704]

Posting at slashdot, Yoda is.

Re:Shoot

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, twitter would have called them "$un".

Re:Shoot

[Sentry21]

Amen to that. MySQL has a huge user and developer community. After working that hard to get it to where it is from where it was, I'd seriously consider leaving it in someone else's capable hands and moving on to bigger and better things (like Fiji).

Re:Shoot

[goose-incarnated]

Especially when you sold it to Sun. There's a pretty good chance Sun will be bankrupt or bought up for a ridiculously low price within 5 years.

--
Any resemblance to fact is purely co-incidental. -- twitter

Am I the only one who finds this comment strangely in synch with the sig?

Re:Shoot

[lgw]

No Crystal ball needed to see that Sun isn't long for this world.

Sun's market cap is down to $6.4 billion. Sun has over $2B in cash, $3B in receivables, and $1B in inventory and stock in other companies.

You could make a profit today (if you could buy the company for thet 6.4B, which you can't) by buying Sun, ceasing all sales and business activity beyond existing support contacts, and just gutting the company for the cash, real estate, etc.

If Sun falls much more, it *will* be profitable to buy and gut the company, as was done very frequently to companies in similar positions in the 80s. For any tech company that *wanted* Sun for some reason, it's nearly free to buy it today.

Heck, one of Suns few remaining large accounts might find it cheaper to buy Sun than to renew it's support contract!

I think the only reason why one of the big consulting companies (Accenture etc) hasn't bough Sun just for bragging right is that those are partnerships, and don't have the leverage.

Re:Shoot

[theshowmecanuck]

If I'd just made a billion-dollar deal for my company, I'd sure look long and hard

If you'd just made a billion dollars, you would look long and hard to most women out there!... money... the best aphrodisiac! Just like The Professor says. w00t! for 101

Re:Shoot

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the only reason why one of the big consulting companies (Accenture etc) hasn't bough Sun just for bragging right is that those are partnerships, and don't have the leverage.

It would be stupid for any consulting company to buy Sun:

The consulting companies would lose any credibility of being vendor-independent and Sun would lose many of it's best brains because the fast-paced culture of the consulting business drives them away.

Re:Chrome Users: new security flaw found

[neuromanc3r]

Crash it, I guess. What's more puzzling to me is the question how this factoid is related to sun and mysql...

Basic astronomy !

[assemblerex]

The sun destroys everything it touches. Eventually it will implode into a black hole and devour what little shareholder value is left.

Re:Basic astronomy !

[east coast]

Actually, it's going to turn into a white dwarf in most likeliness.

But I understand where you're coming from.

Re:Basic astronomy !

[db32]

Actually, basic astronomy says that our sun is nowhere near massive enough to collapse into a black hole. Even then, in a couple billion years the sun will have expanded and engulfed earth long before the whole collapse thing would happen.

In fact, with the exception of a few (H, and He most notably) the normal life cycle of the sun can create all of the elements up to and including iron!

Re:Basic astronomy !

[bondjamesbond]

Aw man... I'm dreading the day that the sun expands and engulfs us.

Re:Basic astronomy !

[Kjella]

Actually, it's going to turn into a white dwarf in most likeliness. But I understand where you're coming from.

The cult of LHC doomsday prophets?

Re:Basic astronomy !

[keithjr]

Trying to find the double entendres in this is hurting my brain.

Re:Basic astronomy !

[db32]

Honestly, it is this style of cosmic horror that scares me more than most of what goes on here on earth. Not that I think this instance specifically is going to be a problem for us (we will either have moved or killed ourselves off long before). But there is a WIDE array of cosmic badness that could happen to us that we can do absolutely nothing about. Hell, there is an extremely large number of things that we wouldn't even see coming.

My personal favorite is when people learn of the whole magnetic field of earth flipping problem, they immediately key in on "oh my god, how could we live without all of our electronics working" which is something we did for a very long time before electronics. They tend to ignore "oh my god, how could we live without the giant shield stopping the sun from bombarding us with cosmic radiation" which is something we don't exactly have much experience with.

Re:Basic astronomy !

[amorsen]

Previous flips of the magnetic field aren't correlated with mass extinctions. I find that quite surprising myseld, but it is at least somewhat reassuring.

no golden handcuffs ?

[KernelMuncher]

I am surprised Sun didn't tie Monty to the company with golden handcuffs (deferred compensation). His departure could have a negative effect on customer loyalty. And it sure does look bad for the founder to be leaving so quickly.

Re:no golden handcuffs ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he is going to fork the GPL version and start from there. That way he has the money and the control over MySQL.

Smart cookie, that Monty!

Re:no golden handcuffs ?

[Jherek Carnelian]

They probably had a 9-month contract to keep him around and now the 9 months are up.
It is extremely common for the previous owner/ceo to bail out in a year or so after their company is acquired.

Re:no golden handcuffs ?

[swordgeek]

Unless of course, you're a talentless, brainless, lying, two-faced, pony-tailed bastard with no future. Then you stay on until you get named CEO.

Oops, was that my outside voice again?

Re:no golden handcuffs ?

[lgw]

There's always a time limit on those agreements. Presumably the time limit is up.

Please tell me...

[pushing-robot]

...he's leaving to work on Python.

I mean, the PSF needs good, experienced developers, and, um, that's all.

Re:Please tell me...

[Just Some Guy]

I mean, the PSF needs good, experienced developers, and, um, that's all.

So you'd inflict them with the guy who congealed MySQL, of all things? What'd they ever do to you?

Re:Please tell me...

[goose-incarnated]

C'mon mods!!! that was hucking filarious, right there ... no, there ... awww .. you missed it!

Re:Please tell me...

[branteaton]

Get it? _Monty_, working on.... wait for it... _Python_? Monty Python FTW?

Re:Please tell me...

[styrotech]

Yeah I got it, but... _Monty_ ? shouldn't that be __Monty__(self) ?

Re:Please tell me...

[tieTYT]

...he's leaving to work on Python.

If he's smart, he'll fork it and call it Monty's Python. Wakka wakka.

Re:Chrome Users: new security flaw found

[sm62704]

He's running Chrome on a Sun box running Solaris! My, it's sure quiet, Larry.

Is it still MySQL?

[peterdaly]

With the founder leaving, the name MySQL no longer fits.

Next slashdot poll...

MySQL's new name should be:
1. TheirSQL
2. SunSQL
3. JavaSQL
4. CowboynealSQL

I vote for #4.

Re:Is it still MySQL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun N1 iPlanet Java System ONE database Enterprise Edition (R)

Re:Is it still MySQL?

[mr_mischief]

You forgot the version 9 at the end, even though there was no 6, 7, or 8.

Re:Is it still MySQL?

[ReverendRyan]

And the actual version number on the file is 1.9.42

Re:Is it still MySQL?

[reidconti]

You forgot the version 9 at the end, even though there was no 6, 7, or 8.

Sun N1 iPlanet Java System ONE database Enterprise EditionOS 2.9?

Re:Is it still MySQL?

[Maelwryth]

Nope, the next version should be FNQL.

Re:Is it still MySQL?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Sun N1 iPlanet Java System ONE database Enterprise Edition (R)

You forgot: Sun N1 iPlanet Java System ONE database Enterprise Edition 2.0 Update 10 (R)

Monty on the Run

[TheModelEskimo]

Monty was last seen boarding a ferry to France.

Re:Monty on the Run

[Briareos]

Auf Wiedersehen Monty!

np: AFX - Reunion 2 (Chosen Lords)

Why is this a surprise?

[mislam]

Why is this a surprise to anyone? It was expected from day one of the announcement. Atleast from my perspective.

Well, I would do the same

[eatfastnoodle]

isn't build a company, sell it to big guys and go into early retirement the ultimate dream of every nerd?

Re:Well, I would do the same

[eln]

Well no, the ultimate dream of every nerd is to have a threesome with Jessica Alba and Natalie Portman (petrified!) with hot grits down their pants, but I'm sure the retiring early thing is a close second.

Re:Well, I would do the same

[mr_mischief]

You mean besides hiring the guys who beat him up in high school to mow his 16-acre lawn?

Re:Well, I would do the same

[eatfastnoodle]

that can and will happen after I have 1 billion in bank and tons of time to kill.

Re:Well, I would do the same

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, no, if I wanted to identify a nerd then one of the first question I'd ask them is, "If you built a company, would you want to be able to sell it to the big guys so you could go into early retirement?" If they say "yes", they're absolutely not nerds.

This annoys me because there are so many people who just want money and who pretend to be in with the whole nerd idealism thing, especially those in the Free software / OSS movement. They might be talented coders, but their care is to advance their name, their salary, their standing, their employment prospects, whatever, and their love isn't actually for advancement of scholarship or engineering.

In fact, I know more people who have used OSS as a temporary CV builder than who stick with its ideals.

(Yes, I know OSS isn't the whole of software engineering; feel free to generalise my point to those who make excellent proprietary software - Mathematica is an obvious example for me, where Wolfram, despite being a self-whoring brat with delusions of grandeur, isn't floating nor selling his company; instead he's produced a package that's stuck consistently to some very basic but effective principles that make coding beautiful once you get to learn them.)

Re:Well, I would do the same

[TooMuchToDo]

I'm pretty sure if I had a billion dollars, I could arrange something like that, and even throw Scarlet Johansen in for an extra couple of million. Damn I need to be a billionaire.

Re:Well, I would do the same

[AioKits]

I'm still researching to see if my ultimate dream is even legal in this state.

Re:Well, I would do the same

[Marc Desrochers]

You left out: Marry hot supermodel.

Re:Well, I would do the same

[chris_mahan]

True nerds don't build billion-dollar companies.

True nerds learn embedded system languages so they can program their train set at home.

And sometimes, sometimes, help the rest of society with some of their pesky data problems.

As long as it doesn't cut into model train time much.

Substitute train set for 1/72 or 1/35 plastic-soldier painting and massive battles reenactments with a dog-eared battle rule book and battle tournament stats programs written in exotic languages.

Re:Well, I would do the same

[eatfastnoodle]

well, I'm very strong physically, for a nerd

Re:Well, I would do the same

[AlecC]

Having slightly met Monty W, he is a true nerd. He didn't build a billion dollar company, he built a database that did what he thought databases should do. Many people do not exactly agree with him (see arguments on /. ad nauseam). But other people built a billion dollar company on that database. It deos not surprise me at all that he has taken his share of that billion dollars and walked off into the sunset. Maybe it is to Fiji, but even if it is, I would hazard a guess he will still be playing with databases on the beach.

Re:Well, I would do the same

[jadavis]

I'm not sure I agree with your version of idealism. Sure, idealistic people never want to retire.

The part I take exception to is that selling a business and moving on is somehow not idealistic. Selling out is not bad by itself, it's only bad if you hurt people in the process (e.g., if it's bought out just to destroy the company).

The usual case is that some idealistic person creates something, it makes people happy, they don't care enough about business details to stick around, so they sell it to work on something else.

We don't always hear about the "something else", because it's rare enough to create something great, so in all likelihood they won't do it twice in a row.

If they stick around with the first thing that attracts attention, and never let it go, maybe it's because that person doesn't really have the courage to challenge himself again. How idealistic is that?

And these "CV builders" you're talking about can be easily spotted if that's all they're in it for. Does it really interfere with anything the idealistic people are doing? If not, there are a lot of people who just see a job as a place to make money, it's not limited to IT people.

Re:Well, I would do the same

[chris_mahan]

Well in that case I'm really glad the suits didn't take all the money.

Re:Well, I would do the same

[viridari]

In Soviet Russia, no less!

Re:Well, I would do the same

[mabhatter654]

sounds like Woz to a tee.

Re:Well, I would do the same

[dave87656]

Well no, the ultimate dream of every nerd is to have a threesome with Jessica Alba and Natalie Portman (petrified!) with hot grits down their pants, but I'm sure the retiring early thing is a close second.

When you retire with a billion dollars you can most certainly fulfill the threesome dream.

interesting timing

[toby]

Monty's been working on the interesting "Maria" transactional engine (evolved from, and compatible with MyISAM), which is slated to become MySQL's future default engine.

Since they recently made a feature-complete ("no known bugs"!) release of Maria, I'm tempted to think that was his personal deadline to quit.

Josh Berkus (core PostgreSQL developer) also recently quit Sun.

I like Sun. I'm sad that they have lost these two brilliant database engineers, and I hope they go on and kick Oracle's (and that other company's) butt anyway.

Re:interesting timing

[Sun Chi]

You can use "that other company's" name. I mean, we are talking about Microsoft here not Lord Voldemort, right?

Re:interesting timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Maria isn't transactional. It was supposed to be, but it did't work out that way. Punting on transactions, they fell back to crash recoverable MyISAM. The next release is supposed to handle concurrent inserts. Other concurrent operations may follow someday. In the meantime, it doesn't support transaction backout, verb backout, two phase commit, transaction isolation, or any of the hard stuff.

MySQL went with InnoDB because MyISAM wasn't transactional. MySQL went with Falcon because Maria didn't have credible plan to become transactional. And that was almost three years ago.

Does Monty know how to write a transactional engine (or even think it's important)? Maybe, but so far, it's all smoke and no fire.

--JS

Re:interesting timing

[Rich0]

I'll vote for the "doesn't think it is important" option. That was the one thing that always annoyed me about MySQL. Rather than apologize for taking a while to support transactions the party line seemed to be that MySQL was better because it could trash your data 10X faster than the competition.

Sure, I like having the option to speed things up by turning off transaction support. That is a wonderful feature to have. It is a horrible feature to require users to accept.

What I'm waiting for is transactional support at the filesystem level. Why can't I open a transaction, move a bunch of files around, edit configuration files to point to the new location, and commit the transaction? The best we can currently do is have a reasonable shot of having a single file in a somewhat consistent state after a crash. There really isn't any reason that file systems can't truly be transactional.

Re:interesting timing

[dave87656]

Isn't Falcon was supposed to become the default engine?

Re:Chrome Users: new security flaw found

[teknopurge]

In chrome the location ":%" apparently blows the thing up.

Has nothing to do with mysql, other then the fact that google is planning on putting a lite sql db into chrome to facilitate gears.

FUD (no way)

[c0sine]

It looks like BS, guys. According to the company LDAP DB this person is still here :-) Sounds like a typical case of FUD, which works as you can see from the comments...

Re:FUD (no way)

[russotto]

It looks like BS, guys. According to the company LDAP DB this person is still here :-) Sounds like a typical case of FUD, which works as you can see from the comments..

Did you refresh your cache?

Re:FUD (no way)

[c0sine]

It's simply not true. LDAP (shown through namefinder) is updated very quickly. I have a number of proofs of this :-)

Re:FUD (no way)

[Ilgaz]

You told him to convert it to Java! Confess!

Re:FUD (no way)

[c0sine]

Convert to Java which part? LDAP server? :-D

I think at this stage in her career

[toby]

She doesn't get out of bed for less than $2 million.

That's fine if it's your bed, I guess...

Falcon architect Starkey also gone

[toby]

It's worth mentioning that Jim Starkey (inventor of MVCC, etc) also quit recently. (He joined MySQL in 2006 to work on Falcon.)

So Sun has lost more database genius in 2008 than most companies ever had. :(

Re:Falcon architect Starkey also gone

[NimbusDB]

Yes and no. I'm not longer a Sun employee, but still involved with Falcon with both a consulting gig and a separate code collaboration agreement. My primary project is NimbusDB, a database designed from the ground up for the cloud platform. But I'm still involved in Falcon code and meet with the rest of the Falcon team regularly. The really big difference is that I don't have to participate in interminable conference calls. That in itself makes a job worth quiting. [The comment above on Maria is also from me. Slashdot was not at all happy that my MySQL email address had disappeared into the ether.]

Re:Falcon architect Starkey also gone

[MikeO]

Glad to see that (from the wikipedia link above) I'm not the oldest programmer reading slashdot, and very positive to know that the generation preceding me is still having an impact.

Re:Falcon architect Starkey also gone

[dave87656]

but still involved with Falcon with both a consulting gig and a separate code collaboration agreement

We are currently using MySQL/InnoDB and are converting the code to move to PostgresSQL because our tests show it faster in our highly transactional environment. We'd love to stay with MySQL but Falcon is too far out and too uncertain about it's capabilities.

What are the expectations for Falcon in a non-Web transactional environment?

And javascript

[microbox]

PHP and MySQL are both good but not great tools. What makes them useful is all the stuff that works with them. I would drop MySQL in a second for Postgres except that too many CMS and other packages use it. The same is true of PHP.

And javascript. It's pretty flexible, but I think most people would prefer something saner, like smalltalk, java, c#, etc.

After that it's for fun

[Lonewolf666]

Some people keep working after their first billion. Like Bill Gates who kept running Microsoft for several years after he was a billionaire.
But guys like Bill certainly don't need to keep working, so I guess they enjoy steering a big company.

Re:Chrome Users: new security flaw found

[lgw]

That's already been fixed in the Chromium codebase, r1677, but the latest download seems to be r1583. If I were the Chrome team, I'd be in more of a hurry to get this particular fix out there.

quel faux pas

[toby]

If I had eyes sharp enough I'd have noticed your initials on the post, instead of telling you something you already knew. Thanks for the clarification, and it's good to know that you're still involved in Falcon. :)

Re:Chrome Users: new security flaw found

[binarylarry]

Yes, you have a point.

Inventor?

[konohitowa]

Since when does someone who codes up a partial SQL implementation get promoted to inventor status? It reminds me of a guy at work (one of those self-promoter types) telling me how he and his team "invented an XML".

Perhaps Linux inventor Linus Torvalds and Melissa inventor David Smith could chime in with their thoughts on this.

Re:Inventor?

[RPoet]

How is Linus any more of an inventor? He coded an operating system. Just because it's more work doesn't make it more of an invention. The "inventor" title should be reserved for people who come up with novel solutions of a new category.

Re:Inventor?

[konohitowa]

Yeah. I know. That was my point. I was being facetious.

Re:Inventor?

[dave87656]

How is Linus any more of an inventor? He coded an operating system. Just because it's more work doesn't make it more of an invention. The "inventor" title should be reserved for people who come up with novel solutions of a new category.

Actually, Linux coded an Operating System kernel.

Re:Chrome Users: new security flaw found

[claytonjr]

That's already been fixed in the Chromium codebase, r1677, but the latest download seems to be r1583. If I were the Chrome team, I'd be in more of a hurry to get this particular fix out there.

If you were the Chrome team, You'd be a lot of people!

IF

[unity100]

so many stuff are using them, that means they ARE useful ffs.

Re:Use stored procedures?

[MikeO]

As soon as anyone who is responsible for any reasonable amount of database-driven code (especially coded by a group of other programmers) allows String sql = "xxx" to occur, they have already lost. Lost the battles of security, extensibility, and portability.

Article Summary

[nathanh]

DELETE FROM sun WHERE name="Monty"

Re:Use stored procedures?

[DuckDodgers]

What's your superior alternative? I thought SQL query strings, possibly externalized with properties files or XML, was pretty common. Your query strings contain ? for parameter substitution or even better named parameters.

The only alternative I know of is building an API that transforms object-oriented queries into SQL. That's fine for simple queries, but when you need a complicated query things get ugly quickly.

All you really need is a good engineering team with disciplined code review. If you don't have that, you have other problems.

IBM

[speedtux]

I think it would make sense for IBM to buy Sun. IBM gets Sun's enterprise customers and they get full control of Java (which means that they can finally open source it for real). I suspect IBM is just waiting for Sun's stock to fall to the right level.