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

Not as serious...

[Anonymous Coward]

This really isn't as serious as is implied. MySQL is GPL. The forks are GPL. Therefore, if Oracle wishes, they can just cherrypick the best patches from all forks and integrate them back into their codebase, community involvement or not. I expect MySQL to remain the official MySQL, unless it completely stagnates, simply due to name recognition if nothing else.

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

[bogaboga]

I have always wondered why people do not use PostgreSQL that much. It is better than MySQL in terms of stability and scalability.

You might wonder how I came to this conclusion. Well, I have used MySQL with MythTV and I have gotten sick and tired of corrupted databases/tables.

I have a read a reviews of PostgreSQL's stability and scalability beyond two cores and have no doubts it is better than MySQL on this front, though there have also been crowds here at Slashdot who think MySQL is better. My experience suggests otherwise.

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

[Ragica]

Funny, I just got back from the first day of PgCon 2009 (in Ottawa). One of the presentations I went to today was regarding OpenStreetMap's switch from MySql to PostgreSQL last month. I think theywould beg to differ about feature completeness. It was kind of sad looking at their schema: one could really sense the limitations of mysql they had to design around. Ouch. Apparently in the end it was lack of MyISAM transactions causing constant problems with their volume of updates combined with InnoDB's lack of text search (can't have your cake and eat it too, apparently) that pushed them over the edge.

MySql

[inKubus]

Personally it's just more of the same from MySql in general. MySql AB didn't do much of anything with it since 5.0 came out. They wasted a lot of time on a complete rebuild, on adding more features no one cared about. The thing about MyQql 5.0 is that it's really not a very good database. MyISAM sucks (but it is small and fast..) and InnoDB is bloaty. So I think that really MariaDB is going to be the future. Of the codebase. That is the nice thing about MySql is that really it's a wrapper around the Storage Engines. But the problem is the wrapper sucks. No kerberos/LDAP authenication?! What?

I could see Oracle taking one of their open databases and adding a Mysql compatibility layer so basically you can run stuff designed for Mysql on Oracle. This is really their bread and butter already, they move legacy stuff off old UNIX and IBM databases into their DB. Look at all the gateways 9i had. MySql only implements a subset of what Oracle can do. And with no support for the more modern, more object orientated practices, along with trees, etc, I don't see MySql making it out of it's current place as a cheap small database for non-critical applications.

That's not to say you can't make it quite stable and fast but it's not that out of the box. And the fact that 5.1 shipped with a crashing bug really makes me doubt Sun's desire to continue the brand. Which brings me to the forks, which are really the only thing keeping a stable 5.1 version alive out there.

Postgres is really not a viable replacement because it's a database nerd's database. I like it, but the data analysts at work won't be able to deal with its quirks. It does do a lot, but not small and fast like MySql. It comes from a long line of great database researchers, all of whom are well known around the Valley. A lot of all the major players' databases in the valley are based on ideas from Ingres including Oracle.

Personally, I think SQLite3 (4) is going to be the database of choice for small web hosts very soon. Small, portable, fast enough. At that point MySql will no longer have a purpose unless they can move into the middle tier dominated by MS-SQL.

Re:Oracle needs to cater to business not the commu

[amicusNYCL]

Your company must be run by morons.

Obviously. In fact, the people who run Wikipedia, craigslist, youtube, Slashdot, Apple, Cisco, Cray, Dell, Intel, HP, Motorola, NEC, TI, Xerox, Adobe, Symantec, Novell, McAfee, Citrix, Continental, Orbitz, Priceline, Amazon, ebay, Google, iStockphoto, Pricegrabber, Yahoo, ZipRealty, Linden, Audiogalaxy, Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Flickr, Freshmeat, LinkedIn, Photobucket, Stumbleupon, Twitter, and WordPress are clearly morons for using MySQL. These people don't know anything about databases.

In fact, I'm pretty sure you're the only person who's not a moron.

Re:How healthy are forks?

[Grishnakh]

The two biggest success cases are XFree86->X.org, and GCC->egcs->GCC. Both of these were resounding successes.

XFree86 was widely criticized for moving too slow, not integrating enough new features, and having someone in charge that everyone hated. Finally, XFree86 instituted a license change that was incompatible with GPLed projects, so they forked it to X.org. All the best developers abandoned XFree86 and moved to X.org. Now, just about every Linux/BSD distro uses X.org, and no one pays attention to XFree86 any more. X.org has tons of updates, improvements, and additions which were being held back by the XFree86 leadership.

GCC has a similar story, though it's a few years older. gcc was getting decrepit, so a new renegade team started egcs. This incorporated new features, revamped the codebase, etc., and eventually everyone was using egcs instead of gcc. Finally, the gcc team just disbanded as they were no longer relevant, and egcs was renamed to gcc.

Of course, there's probably some cases of forks where the forked version went nowhere, and no one remembers it. But that doesn't matter, as it didn't hurt to have the fork (except the guy who started the fork, and ended up wasting his time on it, but that was the risk he took).

Forking generally works extremely well. The ability to fork keeps projects competitive and responsive, lest some pissed-off developers decide to fork it. It keeps maintainers from becoming dictators who only hinder the project's development, instead of fostering it, because it allows the developers to take control away from the maintainer when they've had too much.

It's too bad companies can't work more like this. There's plenty of companies where the company's owners or management are idiots and drive the company into the ground, and all that work wouldn't be lost if the employees could stage a coup, so to speak, and take over. Since software can be copied at zero cost, and OSS licenses allow forking, this can and does actually happen in the open-source software world.