Sun's Mickos Is OK With Monty's MySQL 5.1 Rant

narramissic writes "Back on November 29, MySQL developer Michael Widenius trashed Sun's decision to give MySQL 5.1 a 'generally available' designation in a now-infamous blog post. Widenius warned users to be 'very cautious about MySQL 5.1' because 'there are still many known and unknown fatal bugs in the new features that are still not addressed.' And now we get Sun's response. In an interview Monday, Marten Mickos, senior VP of Sun's database group, said, 'I learned over many years about the benefits and the painfulness of absolute transparency in open source. A little bit of debate never hurts. This is part of being an open-source company. ... People are free to blog about what they want.' Doubtless, this will do nothing to end the debate over whether Widenius will follow fellow MySQL co-founder David Axmark's lead and leave Sun."

Comments

Re:To their credit

[dkleinsc]

The problem, in my opinion, is that a lot of folks have become convinced that MySql is an absolutely essential part of a web application that runs on Linux and Apache. It's getting used largely because it's part of the LAMP stack that some boss has heard a few things about.

Having used both MySql and several real databases (postgres, Oracle, even MS SqlServer) throughout my career, I have yet to figure out what MySql's appeal really is. It's like the PHP of databases: it was one of the first to enter the game of open database options, and so a lot of people use it despite causing lots of grief.