Five Questions With Michael Widenius

volume4 writes "With two MySQL execs leaving Sun in the last week, the internet is buzzing about what is going on at Sun, what is the future of MySQL and what lies ahead for Michael Widenius. Over at Open Source Release Feed, Widenius spoke candidly regarding his split from Sun, the future of MySQL, Monty Program AB, and the open source ecosystem in general."

Comments

Re:Politics as usual

[von_rick]

I think this thread is about 5 question for MW that he has already answered :)

Back to what you said: I think it was mostly the management and less of politics. The role of management is usually to dictate terms that they have absolutely no clue about. A marketing exec managing a SQL functionalities is gonna make the team go sour given enough time.

Re:MySQL to be thrown onto the community?

[ShieldW0lf]

What a funny interview. He talks all about trust and open source, and yet one of the major reasons I have always avoided open source is because I personally distrusted the two major developers.

I remember reading countless times how this or that missing feature wasn't needed, and how it was bad practice to use it in the first place. Then, next version, they'd brag that they had it. They would ignore referential integrity, but hide that fact, and call their bugs "Gotchas" or "Features". They would claim that having intelligence in the database and reduce traffic across the wire was bad practice, and that you should move entire result sets into the middle tier and filter it there in their forums, and on and on and on.

If they had been forthright about what compromises they made, what the strengths and weaknesses of their design were, and been prepared to acknowledge that there were tasks it wasn't fit for, I might have put it to more use. But at the end of the day, I couldn't trust the developers not to engage in misleading behavior, so I stayed far away from it, and used PostgreSQL instead.

In the end, the developers tried to pull a DivX Networks/Project Mayo type of move and rip off the community, and this was only reversed when Sun bought them out.

It's good to see that those lying, thieving bastards are no longer involved with the project. Particularly since I am now obligated to use their bastard child at work.

Re:Politics as usual

[zappepcs]

Whether the speculation on reasons for the two leaving is right or not, there is one thing that can be said: MySQL had enough going for it that Sun paid a tidy sum to get it. Whatever they did to cause the 'break up' it was not a good thing.

Car Analogy: If you buy a racing team; expensive cars, mechanics, drivers... and two star drivers walk out... well, lets just say winner's circle is probably not in your short term future, and the cost of business operations just doubled.

Re:Politics as usual

[sunking2]

Not if you have Ricky Bobby in the pits.

Good he could sacrifice a good 30 seconds

[ergo98]

My question to him would be "Why? Why send so many naive and misled followers back to Microsoft Access level technology and choices when we should have taken those lessons and moved forward?" MySQL, like PHP, is one of those mistake technologies that thrived despite itself, and when you go to the root of it you find someone saying "I knew nothing about the technology, but just started building from scratch, re-making the mistakes every other product made 20 years earlier".

Re:Good he could sacrifice a good 30 seconds

[kilodelta]

I'm not sure I agree with you at all. LAMP has its place. Put it this way, I've administered MS-SQL, Oracle and MySQL databases, I'll take MySQL any day.

Re:Good he could sacrifice a good 30 seconds

[musicmaker]

Two words: Explain Plan
Three More: Share nothing cluster
A date: '00-00-0000 00:00'
Two More: Silent truncation
One acronym: MVCC
Result: Nobody in their right mind uses MySQL.

LAMP has it's place, it's at the bottom of a trash heap. Ever tried to write business objects in PHP? What about dependency injection? Database abstraction? (let's face it PDO is a joke). Hell even prepared statements are a pain in PHP/MySQL (only exist in mysqli, and the implementation is horrible). AOP? You can't even do connection pooling for goodness sake because they turned it off in mysqli, and you need your head read if you are using the regular mysql libraries where the solution to injection attacks is to escape quotes and pray. Do you know how long it takes PHP to parse 80,000 lines of libraries every time a script runs because there is no persistence between requests, so PHP has to parse everything over for each request.

MySQL where foreign keys are silently ignored if you forgot to set your table engine to InnoDB. Where aggregates don't work right, where self referencing updates don't work, so you have to write a program to do what other RDBMSes can do in a single statement. Where your table names are case sensitive, but your text matches aren't.
Where you don't have sequences to generate globally unique ids, where bit fields work like a boolean half the time and char half the time. Where mysqldump locks half your database and doesn't get everything by default which you find out too late because you didn't know any better.

Apache where the recommended default for MaxClients is 256, which anybody with a clue knows is insane for dynamic websites, but most sysadmins put in anyway. PHP that hasn't been bothered to update itself to work with a threaded Apache that has been around for a decade.

I could go on for ages and ages on this stuff. I mean there are SO many issues with LAMP, it's a minefield. LAMP fails when you need it most, when traffic starts getting heavy.

OR

you could use a system that separates components into libraries and interfaces, allows you to modularize, allows database independence, makes testing easy, has static typing so the compiler can catch 80% of problems before they ever get executed. Has AOP, has IOC that isn't insane and is used by more enterprise shops that anything else.

Re:Good he could sacrifice a good 30 seconds

[sarkeizen]

There's lots of comment that could be made about that diatribe too.

First off I'd say that some of this criticism is "Well it doesn't have *buzzword*" mixed with a few statements you are likely not in a position to argue along with a number of things you got wrong enough to betray some ignorance of the subject you are criticizing and at least one instance of "Well the default config doesn't suit what I'm doing". The fact that you have to reach all the way down to that makes me question the "I could go on for ages" bit.

Considering that you appear to have completely stupid amounts of emotion invested in your particular choice of tools I won't really bother arguing them all.

One that you mention twice is database abstraction. Personally I'd call DA a double-edged sword. Sure PDO doesn't achieve the level of abstraction that lots of frameworks do (but one might argue that it's not a framework so...) but at least if I hire someone who writes PHP I know they can write a simple join in SQL. I've met huge numbers of people - from professional developers to university students - so mentally locked into a platform that they couldn't do this.

As an aside one thing I will say about the developers I tend to hire is that they have to show proficiency in writing code in a few different languages and perhaps some aptitude in writing code in a language they've never seen before. One thing I find this cuts down on is the amount of time they spend complaining about language X lacking feature-they-love Y which tends to get in the way of doing actual development.

Re:Good he could sacrifice a good 30 seconds

[drinkypoo]

I could go on for ages and ages on this stuff.

You could, but it would be a big fat waste of time, because thousands of people would still use LAMPs for the simple fact that the software costs nothing so hosting is readily available, and there are tons of working content management systems available for free to run on top of them, and by the way numerous commercial sites are doing brisk business with them. So what if they don't fit the needs of HP or Xerox?

Most of your complaints are about defaults. That's dumb. I mean, the defaults are dumb, but you're still a whiner.

Re:English is Author's Second Language?

[Precision]

Am I being picky today or is English the author's second language?

Yes it is, iirc he's from Finland.

Five Questions...

[RayMarron]

...three of which were answered "See my blog". Article rated -1 uninformative.

Re:Five Questions...

[quickOnTheUptake]

I got the distinct feeling he was kinda fed up with the interviewer.
I liked the "I just answered that." It takes real skill to get someone to answer like that in a short non-controversial interview.

Re:MySQL to be thrown onto the community?

[ShieldW0lf]

I agree -- any database that does not support foreign keys (referential integrity) is really not a database -- it's just a toy. Use Oracle, DB2, or Postgres for any 'real' work.

See, that's the thing. There are narrow niches where that's a strength, where a little bit of garbage data in there isn't going to cause any harm, and the speed mitigates the weaknesses. And if they had been upfront and forthright about the capacities of the project, that would have been fine.

But when you come across another "not-a-bug-a-gotcha-or-a-feature" every other month that you didn't know about because they were forthright, and you're forced to work with projects that were incredibly poorly designed because people trusted the developers advice and did everything wrong... there isn't any trust there. You couldn't feel safe using it for anything significant unless you're actually getting right in there and hacking it yourself and seeing what it does, because you know from experience that they'd flat out lie to you if they thought it would increase their market share.