Slashdot Mirror
MySQL's Creator On Why the Future Belongs To MariaDB
angry tapir writes "When Oracle purchased Sun, many in the open source community were bleak about the future of MySQL. According to MySQL co-creator Michael "Monty" Widenius, these fears have been proven by Oracle's attitude to MySQL and its community. In the wake of the Sun takeover, Monty forked MySQL to create MariaDB, which has picked up momentum (being included by default in Fedora, Open SUSE and, most recently, Slackware). I recently interviewed Monty about what he learned from the MySQL experience and the current state of MariaDB."
Arch Linux also made the switch three days ago: https://www.archlinux.org/news/mariadb-replaces-mysql-in-repositories/
The part he left unsaid was "MariaDB is the future because that's where I will make my money".
Remember, this is the guy that tried to get a merger court to give him the rights to MySQL back again after he sold them to Sun for a nice sum of money.
http://monty-says.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html
http://monty-says.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/help-keep-internet-free.html
http://monty-says.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/importance-of-license-model-of-mysql-or.html
why not just use postgres?
jeez
Many providers don't offer this in their cheap standard package. That's a major problem for Postgres I think. Then many popular webapps like Wordpress or Magento are mysql only, and I don't think it will happen soon that they will work with Postgres. Oh and if they did, most of their plugins won't work, so nobody will make the move.
Both support views and stored procedures and have since version 5.
I believe he is referring to the efforts to divest the MySQL trademark and copyright from Oracle as a condition of the acquisition of Sun by Oracle by EU courts. Not very nefarious as it was under the assumption that Oracle would destroy MySQLs viability in the future.
The more interesting part of that whole issue was when you look at how the US pressured the EU court to approve the merger unconditionally.
It's mainly a problem for Linux distributors: they stopped providing things like regression tests and security advisories. Source: https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2013-February/024478.html
why not just use postgres?
jeez
Ironically, the fact that PostgreSQL is a better DB makes it easier to convert from PostgreSQL to MySQL than the reverse. MySQL attempts to error correct your SQL queries while PostgreSQL is much more strict. The upshot of this is that queries that works and are tested in MySQL have a good chance of not working and need to be checked (doubly so if the original programmer tried to be clever).
The company I work for is in the beginnings of a transition. Our PHP and C software have an easy switch to convert between the two databases but now we get to check to make sure every query works and returns the same results in both databases. The cleanup of our queries will be good in the long term but for now it's a LOT of work.
MySQL AB could dual-license MySQL because they owned the copyright on the code (outside contributors had to assign their copyrights over). Oracle owns the MySQL copyrights now. MariaDB, as a fork of the GPL code, is only available with a GPL license. He can't relicense it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Michael Widenius has two daughters, My and Maria.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius
ayottesoftware.com
Depends on what the code is. For example, if you've been using PDO in PHP, then probably no problem, since there is an abstraction layer between your code and the actual SQL calls.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
It's a MySQL problem. Postgres is SQL standards compliant, MySQL isn't.
The problem is that MySQL only looks easier on the surface. I'm not talking about badly optimized, I'm talking about queries are ambiguous and In many cases where MySQL should return an error it simply returns wrong data. The downside when trying to convert is that in a few cases we have found so far, the original author had simply kept modifying the query until the output until it roughly sent what it was supposed to and the result of that is unmaintainable code that everyone is afraid to touch.
Oracle don't want you to install it. They want you to employ an expensive consultant who knows how to install it.