David Axmark Resigns From Sun

An anonymous reader writes "From Kay Arno's blog we see that David Axmark, MySQL's Co-Founder, has resigned. This comes on top of the maybe, maybe not, resignation of Monty. We saw earlier this year that Brian Aker, the Director of Architecture, has forked the server to create a web-focused database from MySQL called Drizzle. The MySQL server has been 'RC' now for a year with hundreds of bugs still listed as being active in the 5.1 version. What is going on with MySQL?"

Comments

That's the power of the open source license.

[aqui]

It allows for disagreements to be resolved by disagreeing, even when there are corporations with lots of lawyers involved.

You can still fork it. No easy corporate lock down is possible.

Re:That's the power of the open source license.

[vandan]

Theoretically, yes you can fork the code. But there are broader issues than the legal ability to fork.

This has put a huge question-mark over MySQL's long-term viability. For a fork to be viable, you need a critical mass of developers. But we've seen 2 key ( founding ) developers leave, and Oracle buy InnoDB.

If Sun bought MySQL to further the project, then where is the evidence that this is happening?

If Oracle bought InnoDB to further the project, then where is the evidence that this is happening?

Of course you could argue that neither company is obliged to do anything. But alternatively you could argue that both companies have behaved in an explicitly anti-competitive way. This is itself is of course no surprise to anyone other than the US justice department.

Re:That's the power of the open source license.

[Calinous]

Does Sun have a competitive database? I ask because I don't know of any

Re:That's the power of the open source license.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why fork it? Just let it die.

There is a serious, open source, Object Relational DBMS available.

Re:That's the power of the open source license.

[SiggyTheViking]

Well, there is this.

Re:That's the power of the open source license.

[ThePhilips]

In other words, Sun Inc. still has no clue as to precisely what it wants to do with its assets. And no clue what to do with other markets where they have accidentally became leader. Current strategy seems to be "play dead."

And the leakage of talented people from Sun, doesn't really give it a good mark as employer.

Re:That's the power of the open source license.

[TheRaven64]

Sun have offered support for PostgreSQL for a few years now. The version of PostgreSQL they ship has a number of Solaris-specific tweaks that integrate with their other buzzwords.

With regard to MySQL, forking is difficult. MySQL is GPL'd, including the client library. This means that any application that uses it (by linking against the client library) must be GPL'd, or must by a proprietary license (previously from MySQL AB, now from Sun). Postgres, on the other hand, is BSD licensed, meaning you can use any license you want for your code.

Re:That's the power of the open source license.

[Albanach]

Why fork it? Just let it die.

There is a serious, open source, Object Relational DBMS available.

Yes, and Vim is better than Emacs. Why don't we discuss that too?

Re:That's the power of the open source license.

[FatherOfONe]

Your post seems to think that Oracle and Sun teamed up to kill MySQL. You want proof that Sun has done something to help MySQL along since it bought it.

My "Proof" is comes from that of a Java developer, one that uses almost all Sun tools (Netbeans, Glassfish, EJB3, WebServices and would consider Sun hardware if we could). The freaking day Sun "bought" the company that sold support for MySQL they started to push it as "their" default database of choice. Within a few days they had tutorials up on how to integrate MySQL in to your project. That is definitely an act of a company that doesn't want to KILL a product.

Sun has appeared to leave MySQL alone and to be honest the people who stared it are generally the type of people who HATE large companies and wanted to get back in to a smaller starup type company.

So why did Sun buy MySQL? In my opinion they needed to add it to their software stack. Look at their competition and tell me who doesn't have all of the following (OS, Database, Application Server, Development Tools)
Microsoft, IBM, Oracle.

So "if" Sun wanted to compete with those listed above they needed to do something. NONE of those companies were going to recommend Sun hardware any more. Specifically Oracle who now is in love with their own version of Linux.

Now Oracle buying Inodb to kill or hurt MySQL... We totally agree on that one. The thought of a company like Sun giving away software to sell hardware doesn't bode well for companies like Microsoft or Oracle.

How long...

[russlar]

How long until Netcraft confirms that Sun is dieing?

Re:How long...

[Forty Two Tenfold]

About 4.5 billion years?

Re:How long...

[russlar]

About 4.5 billion years?

Well played, sir. Well played.

Re:How long...

[hdparm]

At least Schwartz got properly 'punished' for the company's poor performance - he received only $11.1 mil. pay package for 2008.

It's really tough being CEO today.

Re:How long...

[Waffle Iron]

That won't actually happen as they should be bought up very soon. The only question is by who? Oracle, HP, IBM or one of the hardware giants they rebrand and resell?

The way things have been going the last few weeks, my bet is on the United States Treasury Department.

Huh ...

[ScrewMaster]

David Axmark Resigns From Sun

So, he gets the ax because somebody missed the mark.

Re:Huh ...

[OldManAndTheC]

So, he gets the ax because somebody missed the mark.

Never fear, this is a minor setback for him. I hear he's already writing a book about what he will do in the next act of his career.

Title: "My Sequel"

Re:MySQL sucks

[Reality Master 201]

ooh, 900MB. Positively ginormous, that.

Sombody finally FINISHED a program!

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I have used MySQL for nearly 7 years now. ... 30 databases ... many servers and operating systems from MS to Linux. ... as small as 200k to one as large as 900MB.....I have never had a single issue with any of them in all that time, ever.

Sounds like somebody got a program working right and, instead of tweaking it some more and breaking it again, quit.

After decades of information technology it's ABOUT TIME that happened.

WAYTAGO!

Re:Sombody finally FINISHED a program!

[ConceptJunkie]

Sounds like somebody got a program working right and, instead of tweaking it some more and breaking it again, quit.

Yeah, because requirements never change.

Re:MySQL sucks

[DerWulf]

Really? How about the "bad connection" issue where the database server due to no reason obvious to the developer will count to ten and then just refuse new connections? How about when MySQL trips over itself and locks it's own tempfile? How about the admin gui that pretends to let you change parameters but really doesn't? How about MySQLs abmyssal speed once it has to deal with larger tables? How about introducing new keywords that are common words like 'release' and thus making a DB upgrade much more painfull then it needs to be? Overall I like MySQL, grew up with it even, but there is no use in pretending like there aren't any problems ...

Re:MySQL sucks

[The Bungi]

to one as large as 900MB

Is that what powers your HTML applications?

Drizzle?

[Joe U]

Has anyone here used Drizzle?

I'm about to start a new web project and I get to choose the DB. I'm concerned over the lack of stored procedures though. My last big project used SP's for everything and honestly, while initial coding was a pain, in the long run it was a huge benifit.

I need a lean and mean webDB, so, if not Drizzle, does anyone have other recommendations?

Re:Drizzle?

[afidel]

That advice is only appropriate in the expected query results are small, on large tables using stored procedures can significantly reduce the load on the DB by not requiring it to handle open connections while a large amount of data is streamed to the remote client.

Re:Drizzle?

[krow]

Hi!

We are still working on the first version of Drizzle. While folks are using it, I don't really recommend it at this point. When we feel like it is ready for adoption we will publicly start recommending it.

Cheers,
      -Brian

Re:Drizzle?

[Nefarious Wheel]

Don't use stored procedures. They concentrate ...

You obviously have very little experience ...

Horses for courses, mate. There are good arguments in either direction. Personally I tend to avoid stored procedures not for performance reasons but for pragmatic ones. For one, it's easier sometimes to get a change approved in an application than it is to talk someone into approving a change -- any change -- in the database schema, no matter how trivial, and for another it's easier to migrate or replicate a database to another platform's database (say, Oracle to DB2 for example) when you're only worried about transferring tables and views, not logic. And it is true that the simpler it is, the easier it is to scale. Databases tend to scale by lock-managed clustering, applications by horizontal means (sometimes simply adding another apps server). One tends to be easier than the other.

Sucking data out in bulk can be a good idea too, for safety reasons -- I've seen bank OLTP databases frozen because someone thought it would be safer to set a read-only lock on a report scan, not realising they were using the wrong consistency setting across the entire database & thus forcing the rest of the users (thousands of them) to operate off the DB's log file, then killing the job mid-way after a few hours only to discover he had to face a few hours rollback....

Like I say, horses for courses...

Re:Drizzle?

[Samah]

Don't use stored procedures.

That's a very narrow-minded statement. The application I maintain has an Oracle 10g backend, Pro*C middleware, and a Java fat client. The standard process for an action in the application is to ask the middleware to run a certain stored procedure in an Oracle package.

Given that this application is huge (I'm talking 1000+ tables, some with up to a million rows) and there are at least 1000 concurrent users, it's very convenient to have the logic on the server-side. Any code change to the client requires an outage (to replace the jar file), which is BAD if it's an emergency fix. By putting all the logic (and access to a vast amount of data) server-side, it reduces network traffic, allows easy rollbacks, and allows the support team to apply a fix without an outage.

Some more great things about our setup is that Oracle packages and triggers support networking. We have a publish/subscribe system tied to triggers such that when one user makes a change, it's instantly reflected on every other user's screen.

Obviously this solution isn't best for all situations, but it fits our needs very well. YMMV

Re:Drizzle?

[afabbro]

Don't use stored procedures. They concentrate ...

You obviously have very little experience ...

Horses for courses, mate. There are good arguments in either direction.

Yes. Which is exactly why sweeping generalizations like "don't use stored procedures" are idiotic. There are a wealth of cases where stored procedures are best practice.

Re:Drizzle?

[mlwmohawk]

Don't use stored procedures. They concentrate computation in the database server which is harder to scale than the application servers.

Ahh, sadly this is what "MySQL database thinking" has wrought.

The mystical grail of the enterprise "scaling." Like many things, conventional wisdom often evaporates when confronted with facts. Can stored procedures load the server? Sure, if you are doing something bad. For the most part stored procedures reduce server load.

(1) Stored procedures can be "pre-compiled" SQL which saves CPU time in the planner. (In databases with such an architecture).

(2) Stored procedures allow data selection beyond mere SQL and can lead to the reduction of data transfered from server to application.

(3) In PostgreSQL, for instance, one can create an index based on a function (like a stored procedure), so:

create index on mytable myindex (foobar(mycol) );

select * from mytable where foobar('froboz') = foobar(mycol) ;

Generates a query that uses and index and doesn't do a full table scan.

(4) Computers today are seriously fast, so much faster than the data storage systems that CPU capability is almost infinite with regards to I/O. Any CPU work that can be done at the server to reduce I/O load will probably improve general scalability.

Basically, stored procedures and functions would not exist, i.e. no one would have created them, if they did not help. Saying that "don't use stored procedures because they load the server" is the same logic behind "don't use power tools because they are dangerous." Yes, if you are ignorant, power tools present a huge danger, however, neglecting them means a lot more work. It is better to educate ones self and use the more powerful tools. Those tools would not exist if they did not provide a positive contribution.

Re:Drizzle?

[CrazedWalrus]

You go talk to EnterpriseDB, who've been working on Oracle compatibility for Postgres. I can't speak for it personally, but you might be able to get away with the cost of a conversion project to a similar database (read: close, but not equal). At that point, it's pure savings.

Oracle has features PG doesn't have, sure, but ask yourself: how many of them are you actually using? Of the one's you're using, can they be done differently -- maybe by tying in a different FOSS project or home-growing a solution? If you "think outside the box" a little, I think you'll find that those features are generally nice to have, but not really worth the million bucks a year you're paying to have them, and by applying different solutions, you probably won't lose much functionality anyway.

Is that true for everyone, no. I'm sure someone will tell me about their absolutely necessary Oracle-only feature that they're using, but the fact is that there are lots of projects on Oracle could have used MySQL and not lost anything.

Re:Drizzle?

[Joe U]

In these, the same guy who writes Java writes stored procedures. I've seen some pretty horrific SQL in my time - manual "joins" using cursors, for example - but at least they were in stored procedures to optimize performance. (?!)

But at least the DB code can be reviewed and re-written without touching a line of code in the application.

Re:MySQL sucks

[ConceptJunkie]

Yeah, I had to snigger at that. The project I'm responsible for has a database that's gotten up to tens of gigabytes in size. MySQL was chosen before I came along, and knowing what I know now, I'd definitely consider alternatives, but for the most part, it serves our purposes.

Jay Pipes Moved Over to Drizzle Too...

[bcolflesh]

http://www.jpipes.com/index.php?/archives/263-So-Long,-and-Thanks-for-all-the-Fish.html

Interesting comment at the bottom (#11):

"Glad to hear you'll be working full-time on Drizzle. Even if you didn't escape Sun.

I can't imagine who would want to be a community manager under the current situation, though. Good luck to Giuseppe."

Noooooo!!!!!!!!

[Metroid72]

David, don't quit in this market.
Unemployment is rampant and you'll likely be lowballed for your new job.

Re:MySQL sucks

[lysergic.acid]

there's no need to start dicksizing about the type of databases you manage. no one is claiming that MySQL is the best database management system out there, or that it can handle any kind of application. but for a certain range of applications it's a very capable and well designed database server.

not everyone needs a multi-terabyte database. and the utility of a RDBMS is not defined by database sizes it can handle. MySQL is so popular precisely because most sub-enterprise businesses don't need anything as robust as Oracle. so MySQL is therefore a much more cost-effective solution.

MySQL greetings

[martenmickos]

Thanks slashdotters for being passionate about all topics FOSS and MySQL!

David's departure is in all ways amicable, and he will continue to be an ambassador for MySQL and for free and open source software in general. For some time already, David was working only part-time for MySQL. After about 25 years of working on MySQL and the projects that preceded MySQL, he very much deserves do whatever he pleases to.

Marten
SVP Database Group at Sun
(previously CEO of MySQL AB)

Re:MySQL greetings

[Atlantis-Rising]

Would you say otherwise if it wasn't amicable?

Re:MySQL greetings

[martenmickos]

I think if you ask people who know me, they will say that I stand for transparency and truthfulness.

If the departure had not been amicable, I guess I would not have commented on it at all, or I would have focused my commentary on whatever other positive aspect I could find.

But the best may be to ask David directly. I don't want to publish his email address here, but it is not difficult to guess. Most early employees of MySQL AB, like myself, use firstname at mysql dot com.

Marten

P.S. Generally I am somewhat perplexed by the attention this topic is getting. The beauty of open source is that you can be actively contributing and participating in your favourite project whether you are employed by a certain company or not. So what's the big deal about David choosing not to be employed? He is not abandoning MySQL. With the enormous payout from the acquisition, the founders can now allow themselves to pursue whatever interests and daily routines they like. Good for them, and I think we should all just be happy that open source can provide not just software freedom but also financial freedom. Just my 2c.

Re:MySQL greetings

[krow]

If you look around there are couple of articles that quote David on why he is leaving. It is perfectly amicable, he just dislikes paperwork and would prefer to not deal with it.

      -Brian

Re:MySQL greetings

[martenmickos]

And so he did. See elsewhere on this thread the posting with subject "David Axmark" and ID (#25309745).

Marten

Re:MySQL greetings

[maestroX]

Generally I am somewhat perplexed by the attention this topic is getting. The beauty of open source is that you can be actively contributing and participating in your favourite project whether you are employed by a certain company or not. So what's the big deal about David choosing not to be employed? He is not abandoning MySQL. (..) Just my 2c.

Your cents are worth it :-)

Who has contributed or donated to the MySQL project while actively using MySQL in a production environment?

I am somewhat perplexed by the attitude of some users towards open source. Software? FREE. Support? FREE. Developer wishes to change jobs? NOT FREE.

What the f*ck are we thinking?

Re:MySQL sucks

[mooreti1]

MySQL sucks

And your post, like my response, is pointless.

Re:MySQL sucks

[raju1kabir]

I know! And he's ridiculous on the other end of the scale too. 200KB? Gimme a break. I've worked with microdatabases as small as 5 bits.

Re:Goodbye MySQL

[corsec67]

Or use a better DB: PostgreSQL

Re:MySQL sucks

[TheLink]

"and the utility of a RDBMS is not defined by database sizes it can handle"

Actually there is some relevance.

If you needed a database gigabytes in size a few _years_ ago, MySQL would have been a really bad choice (it still is crap, just less so IMO).

For MyISAM:
You would have to configure it to get tables bigger than the default 4GB limit (there's a number of row limit and table size limit). Hope you don't make the new setting too small so you're still working in the place when those run out too ;).

For Innodb:
Before the single file per table, if you're moving about gigabytes of stuff, you end up with one huge multigigabyte innodb table.

For both:
Adding an index was the same as "alter table" and involved making a copy of the table.

So let's say you have a 40GB table and 40GB of space free. No index add for you :).
Keep in mind if you have plenty of space free making a copy of a 40GB table does take time.

BTW concurrent inserts to an innodb table with an auto increment field were slow till only recently (well allegedly they've fixed that).

Re:MySQL sucks

[guyminuslife]

It's not a microdatabase unless it's stored in microbits. Anything that takes up a whole bit or more is way too big.

Re:Does Sun have a competitive database?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun does not own the Oracle database - Oracle owns the Oracle database. Wow.

- T

Re:MySQL sucks

[theantix]

"How about the "bad connection" issue where the database server due to no reason obvious to the developer will count to ten and then just refuse new connections? How about when MySQL trips over itself and locks it's own tempfile? How about the admin gui that pretends to let you change parameters but really doesn't?"

I've developed, debugged, administered, and administered MySQL databases for nearly a decade now, and I have never seen any of those issues you complain about.

"How about MySQLs abmyssal speed once it has to deal with larger tables?"

The InnoDB storage engine uses clustered indexes and is actually pretty good with large tables. Combine that with the partitioned table support in MySQL 5.1 and large tables are quite manageable. I have one OLTP application with well over 300M rows, and the server runs fine even though it is on commodity hardware.

"but there is no use in pretending like there aren't any problems ..."

Indeed, but they weren't what you mentioned here. I am looking for better CPU utilization on multicore systems, semi-synchronous replication, parallelized replication, better foreign key performance, and better join algorithms. Many of these features are planned of course but I want them now.

Re:MySQL sucks

[TheLink]

I've definitely seen mysql use up tons of memory before for no apparent reason. Trouble is it did this at a customer's site on a live machine with lots of users.

My ex-boss insisted on MySQL - whereas me and my colleague were pushing for postgresql instead. Oh well...

Postgresql has its fair share of problems, but looking at the Postgresql and MySQL mailing lists and bug reports, I'm more comfortable with the Postgresql problems.

Stuff like this scares me:

"ORDER BY DESC in InnoDB not working"

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=31001

So it might actually be a good thing if MySQL fades away.

(which reminds me of the error message when it crashes every once in a while: MySQL has gone away :) )

Re:MySQL sucks

[TheLink]

The problem with MySQL is the "brochure" looks very nice to the PHBs.

But when you get to the details, a lot of the advantages/features are mutually exclusive.

Want fast simple selects - MyISAM
Want fast single user inserts - MyISAM
Want fast concurrent inserts - InnoDB
Want fast concurrent inserts to tables with an "autoincrement" column - better look at this http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-auto-increment-handling.html

Re:MySQL sucks

[Splab]

Then you my friend, are only using MySQL as an advanced file pointer.

Simple things like firing triggers during cascading events, ensuring the client gets the engine he requested are features MySQL does not have.

MySQL is a nice toy database, but until they change from best effort to ensuring our data, it should never be used for anything critical.

Re:MySQL sucks

[siDDis]

Youre joking right? PostgreSQL supports several replication engines which works fantastic great and it has been doing that for years!

You have:
PGCluster
Slony-I
DBBalancer
pgpool
PostgreSQL table comparator
SkyTools
Sequoia

You can read about what Skype use replication for PostgreSQL here:
https://developer.skype.com/SkypeGarage/DbProjects/SkypePostgresqlWhitepaper

And Slony for example is developed by Jan Weick, a PostgreSQL core team member.

David Axmark

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of press about a not to large event. I have been working less with MySQL over the past several years (as the company has grown). And when we got acquired we got to big for me (I like to know everyone in a company).

A huge part of my work have been spreading FreeSoftware/OpenSource and I will continue to do that. And tell about the MySQL story many times more hoping to inspire others to try to start FLOSS businesses.

And I hope to meet many of all the people who made MySQL such a sucess many times over the coming years. /David (who posts so seldom he does not remember his slash login/password..)

 

Oracle also took down Berkeley DB

[SgtChaireBourne]

...

If Sun bought MySQL to further the project, then where is the evidence that this is happening?

If Oracle bought InnoDB to further the project, then where is the evidence that this is happening?

...

Oracle also took down Berkeley DB. It's still there but buried rather deeply. If Oracle is contributing to BerkeleyDB, then now is a good time to be vocal about it and collect some good karma.

Re:MySQL sucks

[Splab]

No I'm not kidding.

PostgreSQL does not support any of these, they are all add on. On top of that none of them are viable for critical environments, some work by replicating through triggers, some work as a middle layer, none of them can guarantee your data in case of primary failure, and none of them has proper sub second fail over (except for Sequoia who doesn't support triggers and procedures) - trust me I've been researching this extensively and there are no FOSS databases that handles this.

Derby

[Kupfernigk]

Sun doesn't, but if you live in the Java world have you looked at Derby recently? We started out using it as an authentication database embedded in an app, and are now making more and more use of it. It supports transactions and hundreds of simultaneous connections, has very flexible configuration, and supports up to about 50Gbytes of storage. The last alone makes it more useful in many applications than the free versions of MS SQL Server. There are many applications currently running on MySQL which (in my opinion) would benefit from migrating to a tightly coupled all-Java solution. The Derby footprint is tiny, database backup and failover is now supported, and you can work with anything from the command line tool to the usual studio type applications. It has taken me 4 years to become a convert, after 8 years of MySQL, but now in the latest release I love it.

Re:MySQL sucks

[Reality Master 201]

For cost, for robustness, for functionality, MySQL is a far poorer choice than PostgreSQL.

I've used lots and lots of databases, relational and otherwise - MSSQL, Oracle, DB2, Informix, Unidata, etc. etc.. MySQL looks great to people who haven't got much experience with other databases, and it looks like a chunk of shit to those of us who have. I'm not even talking about database size. I'm talking about functionality level stuff - views, useful subselects, a single reliable table type that supports transactional data writing (and for that matter, a transactional layer that isn't shitty). Features that are always coming in a future version, but are already available in other products - ones that can be had for free.

There's no compelling business case for MySQL over another product, except that you might need to make use of a crappy open source project that's tied to it.

Re:MySQL sucks

[siDDis]

No I'm not kidding.

PostgreSQL does not support any of these, they are all add on.

EnterpriseDB supports slony... http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgres_plus/replication.do

Re:MySQL sucks

[not already in use]

Ohhh, 2.5 TB! Gimme a break.

I have a 100 TB database stored in CSV format, maintained via Excel and accessed through IIS using classic ASP.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Re:MySQL sucks

[ins0m]

LiveJournal couldn't deal with the load balancing and disk latency issues with MyISAM just flat-out _not_ scaling. Hence, their need for the creation of memcached. Of the others listed, who else is using memcached?

Oops.