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

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[danomac]

It's not so much fanboys. When you develop for something, you want to develop for a stable feature set. If there's going to be a dozen forks of a database, it becomes much more work to test all the versions and apply patches.

It now makes far more sense to develop using a different DBMS.

Note: I've never installed or used PostgreSQL.

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[mikael_j]

Clearly this is a troll but regardless of all other features that MSSQL may have that MySQL doesn't there is one thing that is missing: LIMIT. No, TOP is useless for a lot of stuff and the fact that LIMIT is missing results in lots of painful hacks with nested SELECTs and other crap in stored procedures.

/Mikael

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Religious debate. Way back in the Olden Days, postgres was an unstable mess. Absolutely godawful. Corrupted databases, lost data, slow as moleasses, constant need to restore from backups. Completely worthless.

At the same time, MySQL was fast, stable, fast, worked well enough, slightly feature incomplete, and fast.

Those old stereotypes have stuck. MySQL nowadays? Actually pretty feature complete. PostgreSQL nowadays? Pretty stable and solid.

But nobody updates their perceptions, so the old ideas shine through.

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[houstonbofh]

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

No, that's YourSQL.

No, it's Bill's SQL.

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, maybe you should wake up: SQL Server supports ANSI SQL windowing function ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY) and, of course, when you apply a predicate to the resulting row number all optimization are done.

Then again if LIMIT is The Thing that make you choose a DBMS you may as well get a b-tree indexing library and play around with offset by yourself...

Oracle doesn't care

[Reality Master 201]

Oracle doesn't care about losing the trust of the MySQL community. They already have a database to sell; they're probably more interested in the vertical integration with OS, hardware, and programming language tools.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were happy to sell the MySQL business unit, or kill it completely.

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

[vadim_t]

And then there's the increment functions. MySQL is a bit lacking, with only AUTO_INCREMENT and LAST_INSERT_ID. SQL Server has a similar setup to MySQL using IDENTITY(start, step) and SCOPE_IDENTITY(). But PostgreSQL uses that atrocious monstrosity of SERIAL data types and a damned Sequence object. And heaven help you if the Sequence gets out of sync. Your data is fucked at that point. The DB engine won't fix it. You aren't allowed to fix it. And the next time your app tries to use it, there's a good likelihood that it will lose data.

There's no SERIAL datatype. It's simply a shortcut for creating a sequence, and is equivalent to saying "integer DEFAULT nextval('tablename_colname_seq') NOT NULL".

Also, I'm feeling really curious about this, because:

1. Why would the sequence get out of sync in the first place?
2. If it does, why doesn't using nextval and setval work for fixing it?
3. How will the app lose data? If somehow it generates the same number twice, any attempt to INSERT a row would simply fail.

So please explain how you get what you said to happen.

Re:Knowing Oracle...

[h4rm0ny]

That's an interesting point of view. I saw things slightly differently, so say what you think of my take on it. I agree that Oracle might not actually care so very much that they got a free MySQL when they bought SUN. But in so far as they do pay attention things, I would think they'd steer people away from PostgreSQL toward MySQL rather than the other way around. My reasoning is that there is a clear and significant gap between MySQL and Oracle DB. MySQL is never going to draw many customers away from using Oracle DB, and mostly the other way around as well. But I see the gap between PostgreSQL and Oracle as being much smaller, both in the capabilities of the two databases and the easier time you have moving from one to the other (in either direction). I think that makes PostgreSQL more of a threat to the Oracle install base and thus something they would prefer to keep people away from. Using MySQL as a stalking horse makes more sense to me. Thoughts? Matches the real world or too conspiracy?

Re:MySql

[Just Some Guy]

SQLite is fast all right, but it doesn't scale at all.

MySQL does?

PostgreSQL scales well, but is fairly slow on average.

Honestly, that hasn't been true in years.

The thing with MySQL is that you were supposed to have both.

And yet somehow ended up with neither.

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[ppanon]

OTOH, a dead project provides the ultimate stability

Not when it comes to security vulnerabilities.

Re:Cue postgres fan bois

[maxwell demon]

OTOH, a dead project provides the ultimate stability

Not when it comes to security vulnerabilities.

OTOH, a dead project provides the ultimate stability

Not when it comes to security vulnerabilities.

It's stable in respect to security vulnerabilities as well. No need to create new exploits just to keep your malware compatible.