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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.'"
In 3, 2, 1
If Oracle provides what business needs/wants .. and that's what they have been doing thus far. They will be fine. Nothing to see hear move along.
Point taken... The do not need to provide the wining fork, just support it. They actually have a cost advantage if the winning fork is developed by someone else. The downside is that they can't just merge the open code back into the commercial database, and that is a significant downside.
I've already started planning my open source project to support Maria. I'll probably still support MySQL but I expect the community version will have fewer options and functionality over time and will fall out of use so it's probably just easiest to start making the switch to MariaDB right now.
From my understanding, it already supports PHP and is far faster than 5.1.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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.
Funny you should say that. We're working on dumping Oracle licenses where they're not needed in favor of MySQL. That was going to be expanding our Sun support contract. Oddly enough - it might end up expanding our Oracle contract. That is, unless Oracle gives us reason to look elsewhere for MySQL support.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
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.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Are forks really a fact of life for healthy open source projects?
Most open source tools I use on a regular basis have never been (successfully) forked. More importantly, none of the other members in the LAMP stack have undergone a forking of the scale that MySQL is about go through. Sure, there are multiple 'L' distributions, but there isn't a healthy eco-system of production forks at the kernel level.
-Chris
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.
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?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
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
"Yeah Tommy, before Zee Germans get here
The LAMP stack was always fundamentally flawed because the 'M' was not really an open source public project, where everything else was. We need to replace the M with a true open source project, and I hope the best project wins.
What everyone failed to do, that they should have done years ago, as a standard was build database abstraction layers. I know people will argue about performance bla, bla, bla but I don't buy that. We should have been doing it for years, exactly for this reason. Instead everyone was lazy, picked MYSQL because it was free/cheap/easy to learn.
Now, hopefully get off our lazy collective asses and build in database abstraction layers in to our web apps the way we should have from the start, or replace the 'M' with something really open source and public that does not belong to a company.
My only hope is that Oracle might do the right thing and cut it loose as a fully open source project to develop to its fully potential.
Living in Chile
I've heard the arguments that postgres is as easy as MySQL, and they're bullshit.
Lets see:
Postgres has no good GUI applications that can compare with MySQL's
Why you need more than one is beyond me. Isn't Pgadmin enough?
their command line application is just as good in its own way
Well, ok. Whatever 'in its own way' means.
and the market share that ensures you need to google multiple times to find the info you're looking for.
Postgres has some of the best documentation of any open source project I've seen. Sure, MySQL is good as well, but lets not spread bullshit here.
Installing postgres is also a nightmare compared to MySQL.
You mean in a download-the-msi-and-double-click-on-it way, or the apt-get-install-it way?
To sum up: free > $millions, easy > full-featured (in many circumstances).
Well, it's fully-featured, but not necessarily all of those features at the same time. Try doing full-text indexing on a database with foreign-keys on it in MySQL sometime.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
One server? Why? Your company is big enough that it can afford to be running OC-12 links at your site and OC-3 to both the remote, and the DR sites (500MB * 3 = 1.5GB/min, with TCP/IP overhead, in the order of 300mbps) for your database alone, let alone email and other connectivity, at going market rates of over $600k/mo, and yet you can't/don't want to cluster a couple of servers?
Wikipedia
Is 99% cached content, served as effectively static files
Google
Has some developers who have it installed; none of their major services are based on it
Facebook
According to the video of how it works, is basically a graph database, on top of a giant key:value table, on top of memcache, on top of mysql -- ie, they do their best to avoid actually hitting the database, and when they do, they only make use of the most basic functions (and it isn't even good enough for that, so they're working on a replacement)
Twitter
While large, it's hardly complicated in terms of database schema, and it /still/ falls over all the time :P
The other sites, I've never seen any behind the scenes reports on.
While "we have at least one copy of mysql installed somewhere in our organisation" is common, "we are using mysql as the central database for our heavily stressed mission critical systems, and it works great" is much rarer :-P
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
With most of the exanmples mentioned, a small number of DB errors (lost records, index errors, sychronzation errors) are accepttable. For applications like youtube, slashdot, etc. it really doesn't matter if records are lost. I'd be more interested in hearing about major financial or business systems that run on MySql. MySQL is a nice database--good for hobby projects--even big ones--but nor really the choice for heavy lifting DBs. Most of those examples started with MySQL because they needed free more than reliable.
Facebook issues reports everynow and then, but its a moving target as most of the sites are. Somethings only scale so far. Facebook & Google seem to be on the Map Reduce train for the majority of their services. Yet, Google is one of the major third party contributers to Mysql, although its not clear exactly where they use it ( I've heard rumors of adwords being done via mysql). They've reported uptimes of 2-6 years ( for the whole stack Hardware, OS & Mysql under load) here
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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It's irrelevant. We moved everything to PostgreSQL and life is as uncomplicated and standards-compliant as life can get.
Kriston
Oracle and Ingres were serious competitors about 25 years ago. However, Oracle quickly adopted a significantly better design that put Ingres-like databases (Ingres, Informix, Illustra, the original Postgres, etc.) virtually out of business.
Not only that, the internal MVCC architecture of PostgreSQL is *much* closer to Oracle than any of the other Ingres derivatives - including Postgres itself. The original Ingres hit the wall in large part due to the lack of multiversion concurrency control and row level locking (among many other things). In other words, it was practically useless for running large transactions concurrent with other activity, an area where Oracle shines.
Page level locking and no MVCC means that writers block readers (and other writers) until the first transaction to lock the page commits. Page level locking means that which rows will be incidentally locked up by a transaction is essentially random.
Such databases worked well if you were read mostly, and ran small quick transactions during the day, and large long running transactions in appropriately scheduled batch jobs at night. Unfortunately, technologically speaking, MySQL is about to catch up to where Ingres was just prior to entering its terminal decline twenty years ago. The InnoDB engine is the only major exception. Of course people typically use MySQL for rather different applications than they use Oracle for, and MySQL is radically less expensive.
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