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."

Comments

Ha!

[Daetrin]

I haven't used MySQL at all, so i can't speak directly to it. However i did spend most of today trying to get Oracle set up for the new guy in the office. 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. Oracle's installers suck. Oracle's "deinstallers" suck even more. Once you've got Oracle installed you find that their drivers are finicky. Then you find that the API is limited, the error messages are often ambiguous, the help available online is limited, and Oracle's website sucks.

I feel kind of ashamed saying it, but from the perspective of both a user and a programmer Microsoft SQL is better in just about every way. Maybe Oracle is much better for DBAs who have to support huge enterprise databases rather than tiny test databases, i dunno, but the face Oracle presents to everyone else is a sadistic one. This has been double so since Microsoft deprecated Oracle support in ADO. I thought supporting Oracle was painful before, but then i had to deal with ODAC! Half of me wants to curse Microsoft for the pain that put me through, while the other half forlornly hopes that perhaps that will convince people to stop using Oracle and it will die. (Unfortunately it's my job to suffer so our users don't notice the difference, and i'm sure there are a lot of other programmers in the same position, so it probably won't happen.)

It's clearly a very personal and obviously biased opinion, but when someone doing anything at all related to SQL says that Oracle is really helping them out, i want to laugh and laugh and laaaaaaugh. And then start crying.

*sigh* I should go to sleep now. I have to get up early tomorrow, go into work, and deal with Oracle some more. *shudder*