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MySQL Founder Starts Open Database Alliance, Plans Refactoring

Posted by timothy on from the database-shakeup dept.

Gary Pendergast writes "Monty Widenius, the 'father' of MySQL, has created the the Open Database Alliance, with the aim of becoming the industry hub for the MySQL open source database. He wants to unify all MySQL-related development and services, providing a potential solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL, following the news of the Oracle acquisition of Sun." Related to this, an anonymous reader writes that "MySQL has announced a project to refactor MySQL to be a more Drizzle-like database." Update: 05/14 20:50 GMT by T : Original headline implied that this was a project of Sun, but (thanks to the open source nature of MySQL) it's actually Monty Widenius — no longer with Sun — leading this effort.

6 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Re:YAY!!!! by Ilgaz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If they don't come up with a pure technical reason, a proof for forking the project rather than "big company hate" or conspiracy theories, they are already taking this decision politically.

    If they think Oracle purchased Sun just to kill their project for 7.2 billion dollars in such state of Global economy, they are bordering megalomania.

  2. I'm confused by Stone316 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'll admit, I haven't followed MySQL that much but i'm confused as to the state its in now. With the original founders going off and doing related stuff it seems pretty fragmented.

    Can someone piece it all together?

    --
    "Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
  3. Re:Yes, but.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Just figured I'd bring up here that since they've stated they plan to keep SPARC R&D going, maybe one of their big goals is to retain processor independence, while also leveraging an architecture that better coincides with their probable workloads (Sun's biggest feature has always been IO throughput and reliability and with their highly multithreaded chips they would seem to mesh well for the large scale databases that they'll be pushing.)

  4. what did Sun buy? lessons in OSS acquisitions by cowdung · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A lesson in Open Source acquisitions:

    1. Monty starts db called MySQL, trademarks and has copyright
    2. Monty sells trademarks and copyrights to Sun (presumably for a ton of cash)
    3. Monty leaves Sun
    4. Monty forks MySQL calls it MariaDB

    So in the end.

    Sun has:
    1. A trademark
    2. Rights to the code
    3. Right to sell MySQl under any license

    Monty has:
    1. GPL'd code he does not own
    2. Credibility as the guy who knows about this
    3. The ability to continue selling support services

    So in OSS when you buy a product you don't really get too much do you? (At least if you can't hang onto the developers)

    1. Re:what did Sun buy? lessons in OSS acquisitions by zuperduperman · · Score: 3, Interesting

      > So in OSS when you buy a product you don't really get too much do you?

      I think they got a lot from it: Monty is completely hamstrung because he doesn't own a line of the code in his new "Open" database. Unless he rewrites from scratch he is stuck with GPL even if he wants to give his code to his own wife. And that also means that no serious commercial company can use it because even the drivers are GPL (*not* LGPL) which means as soon as you touch it even to open a connection your own product turns to GPL (unless you buy a license from Oracle).

      IMHO, the first thing that needs to happen (and which should have happened years ago) is that the MySQL GPL drivers need to be clean-room rewritten so at least you can link non-GPL code with it. Until then I've got no interest in it and it loses to PostgreSQL before I even get to thinking about a technical comparison (and please note: I've got nothing against GPL in general, I just don't want it forced inside my own processes by my database).

  5. Re:PostgreSQL by |DeN|niS · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Slony-I is asynchronous. Read postgres' excellent documentation for some other possibilities.

    You also get more flexibility; want to replicate your "current" tables but keep your "history" tables only on the master? Want to chain slaves to slaves instead of all slaves to one master? Want a special search database (you can have transactions and fulltext search at the same time) that only contains the ts_vector (fulltext search index) tables? Slony lets you do all of those.