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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."
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. :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Having worked with many different SQL Databases. MySQL, Microsoft SQL, DB2, Informix.... I have found that PostgreSQL is actually a really damn good Database system. Its fast powerful and very configurable. Sure the other guys will have some advantages over PostgreSQL, but I found PostgreSQL has the advantages where I find it counts for my use, for heavy processing, not just storing and retrieving data.
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.
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.
It gives you two slightly different wheels to choose from, that's a good thing. Apparently some people feel like working on different wheels.
And if monocultures aren't a problem than what's with all this Windows malware?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Okay, then MySQL should go away since PostgreSQL was here first and did it right from the start.
If you look at the development of MySQL over the years its been a long waiting game of features that should be prevalent in any proper DBMS system but the lead developers openly admit they were not database guys when they started out so it's not really any wonder that the product was lacking from the very beginning and still shows its weakness today.
So the benefit is that you have a good product that you can rely on and it happens to be free. For MySQL you have a mediocre product with broad deployment because it relied so heavily on programmers to do in the application what normal databases handle for the programmer. This usually makes programmers happy as they think they know data management. So with MySQL a programmer must also know how best to handle data management, with PostgreSQL you have proper data management built right in. The database server does work rather than just being a storage repository with the MySQL approach.
It's the fault of the users of MySQL for sticking with a non-compliant SQL implementation even when other compliant ones emerged. It's MySQL's fault for not becoming compliant in a manner that encouraged people to take them up on the standards. It's not PostgreSQL's fault that people built to a non-standard.
And don't even bother making the claim that PostgreSQL should have adopted MySQL's quirks. They had bigger fish to match/fry: SQL Server, Oracle, etc etc. They've actively been working to fix their problems in a standard manner, rather than breaking themselves to match one broken database that very few people actually use outside of simple websites, where it's relatively easy to port to a standard one.
Because everyone in the open source community has this insufferable "Me, too!" attitude, resulting in half a dozen needlessly duplicative efforts.
That's right. Open source developers should take a cue from the commercial database market: The vendors like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle don't waste resources on duplicate efforts, but instead they collaborate on the one single commercial SQL database engine available on the market today.
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.
The thing that never ceases to amaze me about Slashdot is that you can say the most uncontroversial thing and there will always be somewhere there to tell you you are wrong. You can say the world isn't flat and there will be someone here to tell you it is.
You are that guy, the guy telling me the world is flat.
Really, if you think MySQL is comparable to MSSQL in terms of stability then you really just shouldn't be working with databases at all. MSSQL and MySQL aren't even in the same class.
What happened was this: Mysql and Postgres got to the point of a usable release at about the same time. Mysql was very slightly easier for someone with a very limited skill set to set up, and was arguably slightly faster, so it quickly became the preference among the crowd that swarmed into "tech" thinking that throwing together some HTML pages was serious programming. This same crowd was also very attracted to PHP because it seemed really simple by comparison to Perl or C for making web pages a bit dynamic. By 2000 or so, it was entrenched as the "LAMP stack", and shared hosting providers were offering Mysql and PHP support as standard (well, sort of standard, with different PHP options available, different versions, etc).
After the .com implosion in 2001, you had all sorts of people billing themselves as programmers, but only being familiar with PHP and Mysql. Many of them are now working as independent website contractors and the like, and this same crowd is also responsible for writing most of the CMS's out there, which in turn means that they use the Mysql/PHP platform that they know, rather than learn Postgres or Python or Ruby or Java. And that means that Postgres support for CMS's is more often than not an afterthought.
I am officially gone from