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Locating the Real MySQL
An anonymous reader writes "In a blog post, Patrick Galbraith, an ex-core engineer on the MySQL Server team, raises the question: "What is the official branch of MySQL?" With Monty Widenius having left Sun and forked off MySQL for MariaDB, and Brian Aker running the Drizzle fork inside of Sun, where is the official MySQL tree? Sun may own the trademark, but it looks like there is doubt as to whether they are still the maintainers of the actual codebase after their $1B acquisition of the code a year ago. Smugmug's Don MacAskhill, who is the keynote at the upcoming MySQL Conference, has commented that he is now using the Percona version of MySQL, and is no longer relying on Sun's."
Hey, maybe people have a reason to use MySQL - a product that only supports that db, or developers who aren't particularly familiar with what relational databases are supposed to be like.
I don't have any idea what the politics behind all this is, nor do I have enough interest to look it up, but it seems to me that if a company pays $1B for code, then it forks left and right and they're left with nothing but yet another version, that's not going to exactly be a good advertisement for investing in open source. While this outcome is much better than a closed source application being killed off, it still would have been much better if differences could have been worked out and Sun had something for their money.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
...whatever is at www.mysql.com. Look, I'm not trying to be flippant, but when I'm trying to sell the boss on FOSS solutions, I need to send him a link to a site that will give him the warm-fuzzies that demonstrates that a. the tech is solid (typically mention Wikipedia for that one) and b. it's not some fly-by-night operation that will suddenly up and disappear.
I'm not trying to put the other projects down, and I can appreciate why they exist, but this is the exact reason I'm always being laughed out of meetings where they decide to buy an Oracle license, or a Microsoft OS, those guys have the message down (i.e. marketing).
I'm trying to be the in-house cheerleader for what can be done in the free/open-source communities and mixed messages just don't fly to a boss who barely skims the executive summary of whatever glossy lands on his desk any given day.
Here we have the one shinning open source alternative to commercial databases and it is now faced with an identity crisis because they sold their name to a company about to be bought by IBM and outsourced to China and India.
Huh?
I think the two main open source alternatives to commercial databases are Firebird and PostgreSQL.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
So, then it looks like Sun acquired nothing. The real IP has walked out the door.
I think what Sun was trying to buy was a little more respect from the open source community.
(At least, that's what I would prefer to think. There is a distinct possibility that that purchase price was heavily subsidized by a certain large company who is quite aware that the best way to kill a technical project is to feed it huge amounts of money.)
Yeah, they went way too far overboard, of course, to actually get that respect.
But, "'e's not dead yet."
Setting aside the brainless rumors of Sun being bought, if I found myself in charge of making the purchase meaningful, I'd be looking at spinning MySQL back out into an independent company and bringing back as many of the guys who built it as they can. Add a couple of developers with other, non-MySQL, database experience to the team, of course, but give control back to the original developers.
Also, don't ask the original developers to give up their independent products.
The MySQL project needed fresh ideas, and this could be one way to bring fresh ideas in. It'd take a long time to get real return on what they invested, but it would be better than blowing away the whole investment.
Anyway, even if the main branch dies, there will likely be some useful development from the forks.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
ACID :).
I prefer postgresql because of the stored procedures, triggers, rules, plpgsql, etc.
MySQL 5 sort of has some of that now, but when I las t used it (MySQL 4), I ended up trying to half-ass implement that stuff client side. Postgresql makes it easier to do it right.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
An "Elite" is a person or group that have superlative skills an ability, and are granted enhanced social status on account of this, to wit "I'm good at what I do therefore I should lead/be popular/be recognized." This is probably tolerable.
"Elitism" is a dysfunction where a person or group uses enhanced social status to asserts superlative skill and ability in order to justify their social status and to exclude others. "I'm popular/leading/recognized therefore I am good at what I do therefore I should lead/be popular/be recognized and there ain't no way those dirty punks over there are as good as us, after all they aren't as popular."
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
ubiquitous, well-documented and free... Why would I choose use anything else
Because it's of higher quality?
Good luck finding it. MySQL has horrible documentation. The whole structure of it is a mess.
Plus, when you say "and if there is a problem, it is documented". Yeah, that is great, but most of the "well-documented" problems are long-standing bugs for insanely stupid shit.
It does make me laugh though, because honestly, I agree that mysql is well documented. Every random question I google for usually has a hit. And funny enough, the top listing is usually a page here--failing that, at least on the first page of results.
Because you know better.
"MySQL works OK for one-app databases and many people think that is all that is needed. It breaks down outside that area, however."
You know something is wrong when a discussion of MySQL is dominated by comments about PostgreSQL.
It isn't degrading. When you clean up enough messes left by people who have no business touching a database, it gets fustrating. Especially when things like this are said:
Because InnoDB is only half of MySQL. InnoDB doesn't do fulltext search. If you want fulltext, you gotta go MyISAM. Guess what happens to your cute, cozy referential integrity when half your tables are InnoDB and half are MyISAM? Bye bye! And error reporting? What error reporting? The part where it doesn't tell you "bye bye referential integrity!" and rolls back half your transaction and commits the other half? Or did you mean the part where it automatically adds default values to fields you set not null*? Or were you talking about the part where it thinks invalid dates are valid and doesn't throw an error? Or are those examples only good for Fortune 10(tm) enterprises and not some piddly organization like yours.
No sir, nobody who is a developer that takes their profession seriously would make a claim that MySQL takes anything seriously. They've cleaned up enough MySQL messes, thank you.
[rant]*one of my biggest pet peeves of MySQL... when I say CREATE TABLE(varchar(255) blah NOT NULL) please do not add your own 'DEFAULT ""' to the end--it is considered by some to be rather rude! I can spot MySQL schema's a mile away by this single trait. Anything NOT NULL almost always has a bullshit default value. Got a NOT NULL int--it will have a DEFAULT 0! Got a NOT NULL date, "DEFAULT 0000-00-00", which isn't even a valid date! How is that for taking your data seriously?[/rant]
So you want the column to be NOT NULL, and yet you can't be bothered to tell the db your desired default value for that column. What EXACTLY do you expect the database to do ?
What kind of weird argument is that? Yes I want the column to be not NULL, but why on earth would you just assume that therefore there must be some default value that's acceptable? What if it's also a unique column?
when you say "NOT NULL" as such, PostgreSQL makes it "NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL" which means that yes, it's going to not allow you to INSERT anything that is NULL and you MUST specify some valid value. That certainly does not imply that a sane default exists, and IF it did, I would have just specified it myself in the first place.
Now a "proper" db might just moan at table creation time that you're trying to do something silly, whereas MySQL assumes you are silly and inserts it's own suggested default.
There is nothing silly about having a NOT NULL column with no default (i.e. default is NULL so not allowed). It is a FEATURE of the database to stop me when I have some bug in my code trying to insert a NULL there, just like it is to stop me from inserting a duplicate value, or violate any other constraint I have set.
Inserting its own suggested default is completely braindead, when I say NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL I want the database to enforce that, and to force me to provide proper data. Period. Putting 0 or '' or 0000-00-00 there is retarded, and it's a complete MySQL-ism.