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Will Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Stay With MySQL?

Posted by timothy on from the so-long-as-it's-internet-scale dept.

littlekorea writes "The world's largest web-scale users of MySQL have committed to one further upgrade to the Oracle-controlled database — but Facebook and Twitter are also eyeing off more open options from MariaDB and cheaper options from the NoSQL community. Who will pay for MySQL enterprise licenses into the future?"

3 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Enterprise? by Florian+Weimer · · Score: 5, Informative

    And the article confirms the large-scaler users aren't part of that elusive group, either:

    Many of the largest MySQL users — Twitter included — do not currently pay Oracle for an enterprise licence. Twitter, like Facebook, prefers to build their own extensions and customisations off the community version.

  2. Re:How do you get cheaper than free? by rml1997 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hell, it's not even cost effective to switch to another SQL database like PostgreSQL.

    Can you imagine the downtime required to export Facebook from MySQL and to re-import it to another database? The users would go ballistic!

    I don't expect any "earth shattering" movement by any of the big users in the near future.

    I'm involved in a project that involves moving databases. We write each transaction to both the old and new structure using our data access layer, then export historic data and eventually, once we've verified the new system is working as expected, remove the old structure from the data access layer. This is the main reason data access layers are used.

  3. Re: and so meanwhile... by gman003 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Uh, Postgres has all the standard GRANT and REVOKE, plus some things I don't immediately recall MySQL supporting. This support goes back at least to 7.3, which is a decade old. From what I can tell from the changelogs, looks like they started adding that around 1997 in 6.0.

    I'll also note that PostgreSQL places a lot of importance on following the standards - they seem to support far more things than MySQL. In fact, looking at their "list of unsupported SQL features", it seems the bulk of them are "embedded [outdated programming language]" of one sort or another, or fancy XML stuff.