Slashdot Mirror
Mickos Says MySQL Code Better Than Ever Under Oracle
jbrodkin writes "Oracle hasn't done much to foster a community around open source projects, but the former CEO of MySQL said Oracle's expertise has helped boost the database to new heights from a technology perspective. 'Many in the community will ... feel that it's not as open and open source as it used to be and that's true,' Marten Mickos said. 'But the core product, the actual code, is in better shape than ever. And I think they will keep it that way.' Mickos, now head of Eucalyptus, left Sun before the Oracle merger because he correctly predicted that the company could not survive on its own."
Seems to like the buzzword "cloud computing a lot". If I didn't know better I'd guess this was a cleverly disguised plug for "Eucalyptus".
But I will not be so cynical. If Oracle continue to develop mySQL and the underlying code-base improves (as well, of course, the actual SQL and language/database interface as a whole) then that's all good.
Couldn't have gotten much worse. I still bet it's taking years for bugs and bad design decisions to be fixed.
Maybe the code is better, maybe it isn't. We may never know!
And we'll care less over time. Not open anymore, move on. Get over it.
PostgreSQL will stay open, and stay strong.
I think the founder of MySQL would disagree, since he forked MySQL and started MariaDB. MySQL 5.5 was a long time coming and added quite a bit, but much of what it added was already in the stable MariaDB by the time it came out. Some of the linux distros such as debian are looking to add or switch to mariadb. I switched to MariaDB a while ago and development in MySQL looked like it was starting to stagnate. Not to go dragging out things, but look into Maria, it has quite a few bug patches, performance enhancements, features and such that MySQL lacks and may never have if Oracle splits off community development features from the "enterprise" version.
So Sun actually went under?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Well obviously the code is better shape than before... there'd be something wrong if it stayed the same or was worse, unless they totally didn't work on it at all.
What's important, and not mentioned, is whether or not its in better shape than IF it stayed in open source hands. Which, from the other forks out there, doesn't seem to be the case.
Anyway, it may not be that bad a thing after all, just puts another option out there for us. If we want open source, we'll just get it from one of the other forks
"I would tend to think I was a wonderful CEO and I did everything absolutely right." Said without the least bit of irony. And people take the rest of what he says seriously?
When we realized we had installed the wrong reason (we needed x86 rather than x64 for reasons that would take too long to go into) it took 15-30 minutes and several false starts just to figure out how to uninstall the old version.
15-30 minutes?! Come back when it takes hours.
Better shape than ever? Is that newspeak for slightly less shit than it was before?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... Oracle funded the further development of MySQL?
And that they made MySQL better that it was?
Oracle, the leader od commercial DB put money in one of the most popular opensource DB?
That's possible of course, but it sounds quite weird as far as marketing and sales policies. Ha!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I just noticed that Julian Assange is one of the contributors in that list.
I've been through lots of version upgrades in the 5.1 series with a couple of our managed hosting customers, and they simply don't appear to be able to make a stable release. One customer's car loan system segfaulted after 600-odd days (surpriiiise!), another seems to break it every 100 or so. The latter had a support contract with MySQL AB and I dealt with them personally - what seemed really worrying was, even though this customer was paying £6000 per year, it *still* didn't seem important to anyone at the other end that a "stable" / "general availability" release of their flagship database was segfaulting. I had filed bugs, with backtraces and sample data, offered them them root passwords so they could do whatever they needed to catch the bug, but no thanks, we can't take control of your server.
To anyone that might say "but why not use 5.5, surely 5.1 is ancient history!" I'd say - this customer has been through 4, 5.0 and 5.1 and not found a single release that will stay up for more than a couple of hundred days. This customer is a MySQL "power user" who got burned on every new feature that was introduced. Stored procedures, the geospatial functions, massive sub-SELECTS - anything new tends to crash it even more often than before, and he's often had to back out and rewrite features as a result. So major version upgrades aren't considered lightly.
MySQL is going to need more than a press release to convince me that they have a commitment to high-quality code. I'll continue to plan my installations around the assumption that it dies under heavy traffic.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Now I'm a big fan of PostgreSQL, especially of its strong developer community -- and I'll prefer it to MySQL on technical reasons alone any day.
But the quoted phrase of yours verges on FUD. MySQL code is GPL, that means it'll stay open too. You might be forced to call it by another name -- but who cares?
"not as open and open source as it used to be and that's true,...But the core product, the actual code, is in better shape than ever."
Well then that amounts to fuck all squared.
Oracle: wake the fuck up. The core product IS that it's open source.
Well thats the idea, if you buy oracle you buy also into their consulting and/or training hours. Oracle can perform really well and can host loads of data if you have a person who knows his way around, if not and you are short on time forget about it.
Oracle is something along the lines of we want banks big businesses etc... as customers and those do not care about expensive trainings and consulting hours, they never cared about the small time developers.
Install in a virtual machine - we have development, QA and production Oracle running in VMware. Then when you screw up the install you revert to the snapshot you took before you started. And once you have one DB installed, you can clone them as licensing permits...
it's not as open and open source as it used to be and that's true,' Marten Mickos said. 'But the core product, the actual code, is in better shape than ever
if it's not open source then the code is in worse shape then before
This is simply a ploy by Mickos to improve his standing with Oracle.
When Oracle jacked up the price for commercial distribution of MySQL, we switched to Postgre and never looked back.
I know there are people out there who think that GPL is the only valid FOSS license and that no open-source code should ever be sold as part of a commercial product. But the existence of licenses like PostgreSQL, Apache, and MIT makes it possible for a lot of small, innovative software companies (like ours!) to survive and compete against giants like Microsoft and Oracle.
Lenient open-source licenses help keep the software ecosystem healthy. As someone who makes a living in that ecosystem, I'm grateful to all the people who create and contribute to open-source projects.
Thanks to them, we now have all sorts of thriving and improving forks. Drizzle, MariaDB, Nexenta, LibreOffice...
Well yeah. There is no question SQLServer is much more user friendly and easy. The reason to use Oracle is because you want a database which exceeds what SQLServer can do on standard hardware. And in today's world that's a big system.
As an aside. Oracle is a pain to uninstall on Windows. Its actually pretty easy on Unix, but the install is more complex.
This article is an advert for the guy's cloud computing company, that's probably highly reliant on MySQL. One quote about the current state of MySQL became the leading headline how and why, exactly?
Wait, is this the same Mickos that first sold out to Sun, then proceeded to rail against Sun for "not keeping MySQL MySQL", then railed harder at Oracle when they acquired Sun, even going as far as to write open letters to the community and stating he wanted MySQL back? That Mickos?
That Mickos is a greedy two-bit hypocrite with a penchant for playing the victim.
There is no sig...
he correctly predicted that the company could not survive on its own."
wow what does the guy have a crystal ball or something? how'd he EVER figure that out?
Informix still works fine and has since the 80's.
Cheap, works better, real support on Linux and it doesn't have to be the RDBMS manufacturer's special distro.
IBM is a lot friendlier to the open community than Oracle, has ever been, too.
+++OK ATH
Nope, not me. I have not railed against Sun or Oracle, nor written open letters to the community. On the contrary. At Sun I was in charge of the MySQL business. When Oracle then acquired Sun, there was nothing wrong in it. I can admit that I personally did not specifically want MySQL to end up with Oracle, but that's just my personal view. Their acquisition of Sun (and of MySQL) was perfectly legitimate. I was invited as an expert witness to the European Commission and I told them the same.
Could be that you are mistaking me for one of the founders of MySQL. I was not a founder. I was the CEO.
Marten Mickos
Sad given all the better alternatives (from PostgreSQL to the many saner NoSQL databses) around that don't depend on the whims of a psychopathic corporation like Oracle.
I guess all the brokenness and non-standard hacks are paying off as vendor lock-in now. *sigh*
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson