Has MySQL Forked Beyond Repair?

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions the effect recent developments in the MySQL community will have on MySQL's future in the wake of Oracle's acquisition of Sun. Even before Oracle announced its buyout, there were signs of strain within the MySQL community, with key MySQL employees exiting and forks of the MySQL codebase arising, including Widenius' MariaDB. Now Widenius' Oracle-less Open Database Alliance adds further doubt as to which branch of MySQL will be considered 'official' going forward. 'Forks are a fact of life in the open source community, and arguably an entirely healthy one,' McAllister writes. 'Oracle just better hope it doesn't end up on the wrong side of the fork.' To do so, he suggests Oracle will have to regain the the trust and support of the MySQL community — in other words, 'stop acting like Oracle.'"

Comments

Cue postgres fan bois

[Anonymous Coward]

In 3, 2, 1

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[Anonymous Coward]

Both MySQL and PostgreSQL are junk compared to Microsoft SQL Server.

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[Moblaster]

It is more accurate to characterize the recent burst of minor MySQL variations as a sporking of the code base.

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[iluvcapra]

When you develop for something, you want to develop for a stable feature set.

Or in the case of MySQL, a featureset at all. I keed! I keed!

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[Locke2005]

One thing I can say for SQL Server: it sure beats the hell out of Access!

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[itlurksbeneath]

Considering that they just licensed the technology from Sybase, isn't that "We couldn't write it ourselves (look how Access turned out) so we bought it"SQL?

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[Anonymous Coward]

So does snorting cockroaches.

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[richlv]

ChairSQL.
if you do things it doesn't like, it hurls a table at you, though.

Fork it

[sakdoctor]

If I could only think up a cliched pun using the term forked, I would be sure to get the converted +5 funny mod.

If only.

Re:Fork it

[value_added]

If I could only think up a cliched pun using the term forked ...

You're way ahead of me. I'm stuck at figuring out what "wrong side of the fork" means. Where's BadAnalogyGuy when you need him?

What the fork?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just tell me which one to use for the salad, so my ignorance doesn't trip me up like it did with that bidet that one time.

Re:This need not be Bad News.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the most poetic comment I have ever read on Slashdot. It calmed me.

Re:PostgreSQL: Why don't people use it that much?

[ppanon]

Yeah, having Dick Cheney as a spokesman really hurt them. Potential customers confuse "extensible data types for queries" with "enhanced interrogation techniques".

Re:Oracle needs to cater to business not the commu

[dabooda]

haha that sounded like the 'things I care more about than you' rant by Dr Cox in Scrubs! ... oh wait, I'm the only one that watches that show

Re:Database abstraction layers people

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had it, from now on I'm going to choose my web stack based purely on the acronym I get. Marketeers take note...

BLOC = BSD, Lighttpd, Oracle, C
LNSL = Linux, NGinx, SQLite, Lua
SCID = Solaris, Cherokee, Ingress, D
WAFT = Windows, Apache, Firebird, TCL
MMMM = Minix, Mathopd, MySQL, Modula-3
WISH = Windows, IIS, SQL Server, Haskell
BLIP = BSD, Lighttpd, Ingres, Pherlathon

Pherlathon is a new language I just envisioned, combining the most maligned aspects of PHP, Perl and Python. I think it'd be really popular.

Re:MySql

[Requiem18th]

(And really, who gives a !@#% about that scenario?)

Why sqlite of course! And they are unbeatable in that niche.