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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."
That will show them, huh?
Arch Linux also made the switch three days ago: https://www.archlinux.org/news/mariadb-replaces-mysql-in-repositories/
Personally I think the future belongs to Postgres. :)
Oracle is now behaving like Monty's old company MySQL AB, trying to force volume users to pay to play. Remember MySQL AB's rigid enforcement of the GPL, with a dual licensing option? I wonder if MariaDB is subject to the same type of licensing games.
Nice dream.
Because JesusDB would drop tables for your sins. Perhaps NoahDB would be better. Built-in disaster recovery - it saves just enough data to replicate everything after the disaster is over.
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.
Citation?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
I was thinking why not name it OurSQL
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Because everyone in the open source community has this insufferable "Me, too!" attitude, resulting in half a dozen needlessly duplicative efforts.
NoahDB is not bad, a duplicate record of each kind.
How about JewDB though? You know it has to be good with business transactions. You definitely don't want a AlQaidaDB, it'll blow up ever so often and the DHS will be on your ass at all times.
I would like to know what specifically Oracle is doing so badly. I've been watching MySQL for a while as we use it at work, and it seems that a lot of advancements have been made in MySQL since the Oracle takeover. They've released 5.5 and 5.6. They haven't let it stagnate. They've released a ton of new features. They still have the free version easily available on their website. It seems like their prices have gone up if you want the supported version, but there are other providers out there.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Why isn't there an audio of this interview? This should be routine now. While I appreciate efforts to provide this dialogue, I hope the author(s) don't expect that folks will always want to read through all the verbiage.
I would have been able to listen to the interview while on my way to work. But thanks anyway and sorry, I had to get this off my chest.
The part he left unsaid was "MariaDB is the future because that's where I will make my money".
Except that he put a lot of effort and money into organizing a team of developers for the last four years. Just compare what's going on in Oracle's land vs this fork.
It's another case of OpenOffice vs LibreOffice.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
Without the GPL, Mariadb would not exist.
Oracles purchased of MySQL never made sense: A popular but very lightweight database? I once used it on an enterprise project and it was too buggy and had terrible locking and reliability problems. If your database is down you're losing lots of money - we lost $50K an hour. InnoDB helped a bit, but in the end we found it MySQL unworkable and moved to PostgreSQL. Oracle is an enterprise company which makes kazillions selling enterprise software to, you know, enterprises. Maybe some ill-informed executive thought they could use MySQL to target the low-end of the market, but eventually realised MySQL just wasn't up to the task and *that* is why they abandoned it.
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.
"Although MySQL is still widely used — Db-engines.com ranks it as the third most popular RDBMS after Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, compared to MariaDB coming in at #35 — "
They should had read their methodology before citing them wrong. It is not what is more used (as mysql is basically the default db used by most popular web apps, should be more in the order of popularity of php than in the oracle, like it or not) but what have more active discussion around in certain circles. Even if you think that that measurement "matters" they are talking about "most popular RDBMS" and in the list of RDBMS (not general DBs) MariaDB is #17 (and as mostly transparent replacement of mysql, probably should be in reality between the top 10)
Rather than actually discuss an obvious failing of open source communities at large--a failing that applies directly to commonly-used databases--let's just suppress the opinion. There ya go!
Although (irrespective if we believe the specific numbers or not) ~1% of desktop users are Linux users, I think that 1% is a very significant one containing much of the people doing community contributions to open source projects (either patches or good bug reports). Because of this, I think the fate of the two ex-Sun projects OpenOffice and MySQL is very uncertain, despite having a massively higher user share thanks to MacOSX and Windows users and an established brand. Long-term, I think the developer mind share is more significant and that is obtained by being the default option in various Linux distros.
al-Qaeda already means "the base"
wiki:
Experts debate whether or not the al-Qaeda attacks were blowback from the American CIA's "Operation Cyclone" program to help the Afghan mujahideen. Robin Cook, British Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001, has written that al-Qaeda and Bin Laden were "a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies", and that "Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."[278]
NotLarry'sSQL would've been better.
"The Base Database"
Sounds cool in a early nineties BBS kind of way
I have. It is just that most people with MySQL deployments or MS SQL deployments just use the Database as a basic CRUD system. So you install it and it let it go. PostgreSQL is a real DB system.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Shite? Seriously? Postgres handles data more safely than MySQL. It has less risk of getting taken over by a giant like Oracle. It's fast. It's Free. Are you just trolling or what?
I made the switch years ago and have never looked back. I was really glad that Heroku adopted Postgres as their standard database and even began providing Postgres as a service (https://postgres.heroku.com), it makes my life easier.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
Founder and head of software project claims the future belongs to them. News at 11.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Michael Widenius has two daughters, My and Maria.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius
ayottesoftware.com
Oh and a son named Max as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaxDB
Sorry Max, didn't mean to leave you out.
ayottesoftware.com
Everyone wants Mongo and Redis and all that jazz these days anyway...and quite frankly, they ARE better for web applications.
I predict MySQL/MariaDB/whatever will slowly fall out of favor in the next few years.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
The only thing Oracle is doing wrong is thinking that no one could be bold enough to try and sell the same product twice.
It's a gutsy move. It really is. Sell MySQL to Sun. Claim Sun's purchaser is doing __________ (fill in the blank with whatever evil nasty thing you like) with it. But that's ok, MariaDB will save you from that. Distributions flood to it to get away from the nasty big evil corporation, and suddenly Monty has legally taken back control of what he sold for a cool billion dollars.
The best part about it, is if Oracle says anything about it, then it just looks like they are trying to trash talk the little guy who is just trying to do the right thing for
the community.
And before you think of flaming the idea, remember, Monty is very much the businessman. He almost invented using the GPL as a weapon. He stopped releasing any connector or client licensed as LGPL so he could claim that even using MySQL as a back-end for something else required the entire front-end to be GPLed too - either that or pay him for a commercial license.
The next company to buy something from Monty better get an iron clad agreement never to fork it.
Yes, it is. In this case, we have two different projects that are both hard at work on inventing the wheel. We all know exactly how we want the wheel to work, but because we're dividing our efforts we're getting two wheels that work very similarly, and aren't truly interchangeable.
A SQL database is meant to store and retrieve data in a very specific way, and do those tasks as quickly and reliably as possible. The mathematics that define how best to accomplish these goals is a common factor. So why the hell do we have two independent projects chasing those goals?
You tell me: what is the benefit? (And don't start spouting terms "monoculture," because that's baloney. This isn't a biological ecosystem we're talking about here, and even if you use that term, Apache proved it wasn't a problem a long time ago.)
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).
This doesn't really fit in with the concept of being perfect with what you supply but flexible with what you accept though does it?
I can understand that Postgres is probably more standards compliant and it is very admirable that it helps you write better SQL by refusing to run badly optimised drivel. The problem with this approach though it is assumes that all developers want to write better SQL.
Many developers in the world of work don't give too hoots about the quality of the work they produce, they just want go work 9-5 then go home and do other stuff. We might not like it, but there are tons of them, I bet all the people who are working know at least 1 or 2 in their office (If your still at university then they are the guys study CS that hate you for being a geek, unfortunately they don't fail and crawl under a rock). These developers will complain loudly about things "not working" under Postgres and just blame the DB.
You can argue that Postgres is more standards compliant to management until you are blue in the face, but unless you can demonstrate real world benefits your manager is going to go with MySQL. Sometimes the efficiency of the better queries is a real world benefit, but often that is outweighed by the increased costs of training developers to use postgres (there are fewer postgres devs out there than mysql) since in many situations it is cheap to just throw hardware at a problem. Also the majority of the time efficiency is not really needed since very few people will use the system anyway.
Technical decision makers will often prefer the tool that is easier to use as the complicated one is probably beyond them. That is why the became managers.
I dont read
Because JesusDB would drop tables
I see what you did there. Brilliant. =)
/* No Comment */
So what you're saying is that all your al-Qaeda are belong to us?
... and considering that Oracle has engineered incredibly reliable and extensible enterprise databases...
You just gave me a hernia. Thanks.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
Because Windows is shit? Of course, Windows is quite secure these days. I already answered your point by referencing Apache HTTPD. Try again, maybe?
Again, you're using a term from an entirely different sphere that describes a phenomenon among biological organisms. Software products don't have variation from copy to copy, they don't breed, and they don't evolve through natural selection. They're designed and modified in response to specific needs and threats. Nothing could be further from how living things survive and propagate.
That does sound more like developer problem than a mysql one though. You should touch it.. a lot.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
I don't disagree with that but there is also a good reason we tend to prefer strongly typed languages: it aids in debugging. Having something error out is much easier to debug than having something return bad data or worse yet: silently corrupt data when writing.
It's his blog. About the best source you can ask for.
Didn't he have a son - little Bobby Tables?
Here's why: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-cloud-sql-discuss/rKtuhdBIdvI/ZLPL5LG4z1YJ
It's Monty's personal blog. What more do you want? You won't get a better source of Monty's own words than Monty's blog with his own words that he wrote. It's the very definition of a primary source.
Like say Florian Meuller?
If you replace MySQL with MariaDB, you get LAMP instead of LAMP.
Oh, wait...
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
So true. There should always be some kind of error or warning. If the developer then chooses to suppress it, that's on them. I do like MySQL errors though. Much more descriptive than the MSSQL ones i get regularly at work.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
> You definitely don't want a AlQaidaDB, it'll blow up ever so often
The phrase "al quaida" means "the base" or "the database" because it was a list of followers.
Oh and a son named Max as well.
And MaxDB is a former MySQL AB product (together with SAP AG).
The domain maxdb.org is now owned by Oracle. maxsql.org is still up for grabs :)
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
Oh dear, please disregard.
I didn't see the link in your post.
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
That is a good use-case for sqlite, and I often use sqlite for similar reasons, but you could do something similar with MySQL's mysqldump and mysqlimport commands.
You would serialize your live MySQL instance to a file with mysqldump, ship that file with your project, and then the end-user would bring up their own live MySQL instance and deserialize the file into that instance with mysqlimport.
The reason you can't just copy around a MySQL or PostgreSQL file and use it directly like you can sqlite, is that these databases possess "process" components http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_%28computing%29 as well as "file" components. Sqlite relies on the program accessing the data to provide the "process" for running the software that accesses the sqlite file. It's a pretty significant architectural difference between them.
This means, among other things, that MySQL and PostgreSQL can be run on a central computer, which other computers access over the network, and sqlite cannot (unless you export sqlite via a sufficiently POSIX-compliant network filesystem, but most network filesystems do not provide all the support necessary to allow concurrency-safe sqlite access).
Who the hell would name their product MariaDB?