Apple Removes MySQL From Lion Server

sfcrazy also noticed that Apple has officially removed MySQL from Lion Server, opting instead to include PostgreSQL, albeit in command line only form. The article speculates that the change is because MySQL is now Oracle property, and Apple is concerned about IP issues following all the legal issues surrounding Java.

Comments

Much better anyway

[Anrego]

I just wish it was a little more user friendly. That was the one thing MySQL had going for it.. dead simple to use and admin.. and I imagine Apple's frontend probably made it even more so. Postgres isn’t as bad as oracle (by a long shot) but it certainly requires a little background reading to use. MySQL you can pretty much throw on a box and start using right away. This made it insanely newbie friendly (and cheap webhost admin friendly) and is probably the reason it became so prevalent.

For the record I’m no fan of Apple and I think using apple as a server is insane but I actually agree with Apple on this one.

Re:Much better anyway

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Postgres isnâ(TM)t as bad as oracle (by a long shot)...

Talk about "damning with faint praise"!

Re:Much better anyway

[suso]

I agree. Been using PostgreSQL since 2004 and only occasionally use MySQL. I could see the writing on the wall when the mysql.com site kept moving the link for their documentation around, making it harder to find. My gripe about PostgreSQL is the same, its harder to admin, especially in a shared hosting environment.

Re:Much better anyway

[Atzanteol]

"Use and admin" != "install."

Re:Much better anyway

[amorsen]

I keep hearing that Postgres is hard to admin. Yet Postgres integrates with the normal Unix user accounts so I don't have to worry about users and passwords, it uses sockets by default so I don't have to worry about networking (unless the SQL server is remote), it provides sane semantics without having to worry about table types...

I like SHOW CREATE TABLE from MySQL and the \-commands could use some aliases, but other than that Postgres is rather nice to admin and use.

Re:Much better anyway

[Anrego]

Installation is nothing as you said...

Main different is in managing users/databases/tables.

MySQL uses a dead simple system. You have a username and password possibly linked to a hostname.. and it has some global permissions and some database specific permissions.

Postgres has a much more robust (and as a result considerably more complicated) security setup.Authentication can happen through one or many different means.. most of which require a little configuration and more importantly you need to know they exist/how they work! This also complicates connecting to the database.

Additionally where MySQL has an ultra friendly console app with built in help for creating users and databases.. postgres has a series of scripts. The default way ot creating a new table is to copy one from a provided template (called template1). Again, this is all stuff you need to learn before doing. Someone can run the mysql command, run help, see "CREATE DATABASE" and kinda go from there. To use postgres you need to know that this template exists, how to use it, and what the hell you are actually doing... and then you need to figure out how to control who has acess to it.

Re:Much better anyway

[TheRaven64]

I've been using PostgreSQL since about 2001, on and off, including administrating a network with a small server that gave about 100 people web hosting with a PostreSQL database. I never understood the 'harder to admin' thing. For each user, you need to run createuser. You then need to run createdb for each db. I'm not sure how much simpler it could be.

Re:Much better anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

pgAdmin3 is the way to go, it works really well and pretty much has a "just give me a damn database" button.

I started with PostgreSQL and had to use MySQL for some projects later. I find MySQL and its tools to be cumbersome, but that's likely just due to my familiarity with PostgreSQL.

Re:Much better anyway

[TheRaven64]

Postgres doesn't have a "just give me a damn database" option

$ createdb myDBName

Now I have a new db. Was that really hard? Well, it only works because I am a valid PostgreSQL user. For completeness, I'd also need to do something like:

$ sudo -u postgresql createuser theraven

Actually, the sudo part of this is not required if I am a user that is allowed to create users, but assuming a fresh PostgreSQL install from a standard package.

Re:Much better anyway

[GGardner]

I always found PostgresQL harder to admin. It needs to be VACUUM'ed periodically. How often? The poor admin is supposed to figure that out themselves. Oh, and don't try to actually use the database during a VACUUM. Even after the autovacuum feature was added, it never seemed to work right, and my databases still needed to be vacuumed by hand, sometimes taking more than a day to run. Even with frequent vacuuming, indexes can get bloated -- I would see indexes with more pages allocated than entries, which needed to be manually reindexed. Worse, you need to tell postgres how much memory to allocate for vacuum'ing, and if you don't get it right, it 'leaks' disk space. None of these sorts of things have ever been a problem for MySQL.

Re:Much better anyway

[Alex Belits]

Moar liek praising with faint criticism. Oracle has many flaws but its manageability is reasonably tied to the complexity of setup being managed.

Re:Much better anyway

[fuzzytv]

Not true. Manual vacuuming is not needed since PostgreSQL 8.1, released 2005/11, that's almost 6 years ago. The functionality is called 'autovacuum" and it's fully automatic so you don't need to care about it anymore, and it was significantly improved in the following versions. In some cases you have to tune it a bit (to make it more aggresive for example), but in 99% it works fine out of the box.

Maybe your site was one of those 1% that needed a bit more tuning, or maybe changes at the application level (not everything that works on one database will work fine one another one). Otherwise it's a pure FUD. We're running a lot of applications (with a lot of write activity) on PostgreSQL, and it works perfectly.

Sure, nothing is perfect - for example the memory management is not perfect, you need a bit of experience when setting the memory limits. But I really don't think "leaking to disk" is the right term. You can set 'maintenance_work_mem' and if the process needs more, it has to put that on disk. But with reasonable limit and autovacuum that really does not happen.

Re:Much better anyway

[slartibartfastatp]

Having a good GUI is only good for casual users.

It's also good for developing and debugging.

Re:Much better anyway

[The Dawn Of Time]

Ahh, hatred. The funniest of all emotions.

Re:Much better anyway

[PhrstBrn]

aid is a reference to a.id
bid is a reference to b.id

START TRANSACTION;
INSERT INTO a (id, bid) VALUES(1,2);
INSERT INTO b (id, aid) VALUES(2,1);
COMMIT;

Doesn't work.

Will anyone use Lion 'server'?

[cryfreedomlove]

Why pay Mac premiums for a server? Macs are great for carrying around (my preference) but I'm not sure why I'd put one in a rack.

Re:Will anyone use Lion 'server'?

[vlm]

Why pay Mac premiums for a server? Macs are great for carrying around (my preference) but I'm not sure why I'd put one in a rack.

The capex is pocket change compared to the labor expense, unless you're doing something absolutely huge or crazy. The "mac premium" is somewhere between one days salary for me, and one days consulting fee. Its to the point where "how quickly you can unpack the shipping box" is a major portion of the labor expense differential between apple vs PC.

I assume the local apple store provides fantastic support to server buyers just as they do for everyone else; for a small business owner this is vital.

Re:Will anyone use Lion 'server'?

[rrossman2]

They're used at Penn State fairly heavily, and I know so for the Education College. There's a lot of Macs used both by employees in the Education College, as well as by students, and the XServes are used in a rack to host the stuff for the Mac systems (using for example OpenDirectory pushing stuff from the Active DIrectory windows servers, as well as for DeployStudio and other uses)

Re:Will anyone use Lion 'server'?

[bedouin]

The Army or Navy was using them with PPC Linux I believe.

Re:Will anyone use Lion 'server'?

[stickystyle]

Right, it's not really ment to be end user serviced, because most end users are not capable of servicing a dead drive. You simply pay $149 to extend you AppleCare coverage to three years when you purchase your shiny new macmini server, and when a drive fails they can walk it into an apple store and the "Genius" will replace the drive for them, no extra charge.

THAT is exactly what small businesses need. I've worked large multi-national enterprise IT, and I've worked small business; oftentimes my "Enterprise" brain wants to kick in and build out a fully redundant setup for a small business that is only employing 8 people making a few thousand profit each month. In my mind of five nines of uptime it makes sense, but for those 8 people it makes no sense at all.

MySQL can still be installed

[UnknowingFool]

To be clear, MySQL can be installed on Lion; it's just no longer installed by default.

Re:MySQL can still be installed

[DrgnDancer]

To be more clear, the server version of Lion can still have MySQL installed, but the server package doesn't include it by default.

Re:Samba has also been removed from server

[Henriok]

Apple stopped using SAMBA after SAMBA moved to GPL3 and Apple don't want to use such a license.

Re:I'm not a fan of Apple but...

[erroneus]

No doubt. Anything with the Oracle logo I tend to want to back away from. That said, I like Virtualbox and I will be sad when Oracle finally pulls some stunt where I will have to quit using it and return to pirating VMWare Workstation -- I really don't like VMWare Workstation any longer -- just not as easy to use as VBox. (There was a time when VMWS was easier than VBox, but VBox matured greatly with Sun at the helm... fortunately, there is an OSE but it doesn't have the USB support as far as I know... or is it USB 2.0 support... whatever the case, it's still free and I will use it until it's not... and pray that the features of VBox OSE catch up with the main product.)

But backing away from Oracle in a highly public and visible way speaks volumes to the rest of the business community and should serve to make people think a little more about their views on Oracle product usage as not only is it insanely expensive, it is also a bit toxic.

Re:Samba has also been removed from server

[pieterh]

Yes, the reason here seems to be GPL-related, and nothing to do with Oracle and Java. Postgresql uses an MIT/X11 style license. MySQL is GPL. This is a trend at Apple.

The reason, ironically, is probably the GPLv3's anti-patent clauses. My hypothesis is that Apple's lawyers have picked up on this and it's now company policy to avoid GPLv3 software in their stack, at any cost.

Installation of MySQL server on Mac OS X Lion

[psergiu]

http://www.djangoapp.com/blog/2011/07/24/installation-of-mysql-server-on-mac-os-x-lion/

1) Download the latest 64-Bit DMG Archive (Apple Disk Image) from MySQL Site (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/). Current latest version is 5.5.14 which I’ll be using to install on my machine.
2) Mount the Disk Image (I mean open/double-click the DMG file) and install MySQL server by double-clicking the PKG file (in my case mysql-5.5.14-osx10.6-x86_64.pkg) and follow onscreen instructions. ( It will ask for Master password, as it installs MySQL server in /usr/local )
3) Add /usr/local/mysql/bin to your path by editing .profile file. (Optionally you can create alias to mysql and mysqladmin as mentioned in README File)
4) You can start MySQL server by running “/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe &” from terminal but Disk image you downloaded also consists of Startup Package & Preferences Pane which allows you to start/stop MySQL server from System Preferences and even Automatically Start MySQL Server at Startup.

Re:Samba has also been removed from server

[jellomizer]

GPL3 is in response to companies that found a way to make money and secure a market using GPL2 technology. I would have been happier if GPL3 stated that if you put your patented code in a GPL program you are agreeing to allow you patent free and unencumbered use in all GNU/GNU Compatible code.

Re:Samba has also been removed from server

[CharlyFoxtrot]

It's not prebuilt but Macports has ports for samba 3.2.15 and samba 4.0.0tp5. Installing from Macports isn't difficult for anyone with a modicum of unix savvy.

Re:A PostgreSQL farm

[vlm]

I'm told the main difference between installation of postgres vs mysql is [which package to install]

Is this for one user and one database on a box, or potentially hundreds of databases, one for each hosting customer?

A dozen boxes, more or less one admin, either one customer or a dozen departments or hundreds of users depending how you look at it, dozen databases, hundreds of tables.

Currently backup and deployment of new boxes are currently pretty tightly linked... bring up a new box, run a script to inject last nights backup of the schema and data from another box, run a script to tweak local box config values in the DB (just a bunch of SQL update table blah set blah = 'new' where blah='old'). Essentially bringing up a new box is the automated "restore" script followed by automated "customization" script. Lots of Puppet, if you're familiar with that automation system. Hoping I can keep on doing things that way, same concepts just a different backend.

Conceptually I'm dreaming swapping out the backend DB should be about as complicated as swapping out the mysql db engine from innodb to myisam and back. During a maint window, automation to dump it, modify it, import it, theoretically a quick hands off change. Realistically its looking like a whole heck of a lot of work. All to get Kerberos logins. Which has successfully generated a loss of motivation to actually do it.

Re:Samba has also been removed from server

[Sloppy]

The whole TIVO clause is nothing more than "I don't like what you're doing with my software I said was free, so I'm making it less free, and calling it more free".

More like "I don't like that you've taken software that I tried to make perpetually user-auditable and user-maintainable, and found a way to prevent users from having the capacity to audit or maintain it."

As soon as you look at the question in terms of "less free" or "more free" you will get it wrong. It's not about degrees of freedom; it's about whose freedom when there's a conflict. GPL3 looks at the situation where developers' and users' interests conflict, and like Tron, fights for the users.

This is dead simple to understand if you go back and look at the roots of all this stuff. RMS wasn't just a programmer; he was a guy who had a printer that he wanted to use. It is really cool that a lot of programmers have followed his ideals, but dudes, it's not for us. It's for them (the people who hire us) because we recognize that sometimes we're them. Unless you're totally building all your computers out of transistors from the ground up, you're always one of "them," to some degree.

This just in...

[dn15]

This just in, MySQL is still free / open source and you can install it if you want.

A more appropriate headline would have been "Postgres becomes default OS X Server database"

Re:Samba has also been removed from server

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

Creepy wrote:

"GPL3 is a (commercial) plague - anything that uses any GPL3 library MUST comply by GPL3 and any license that is not GPL3 becomes GPL3, so Apple had to abandon SAMBA - if they integrate a SAMBA interfacing gui into their OS (which they did under GPL2), they immediately are required to release the entire OS under the GPL."

Can I have some of your 'shrooms please, they must be *really* good :-).

This is so far from the truth it's easier just to point at this:

ftp://www.samba.org/pub/samba/slides/linuxcollab-why-samba-went-gplv3.pdf

and hope people read it than to try and rebut your ravings.

Jeremy.