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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?"

17 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. and so meanwhile... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... PostgreSQL is over in the corner, saying, "Hey guys! I'm open! I'm open!"

    But no one throws the ball the Postgres. Because no one like Postgres.

    So Postgres goes home and does some homework.

    1. Re:and so meanwhile... by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Funny, but not actually true.

      We used to use MySQL unless a customer demanded Oracle. Now we've switched to Postgres, because MySQL's future is so hazy and we typically have to support these systems for ten years or more.

    2. Re:and so meanwhile... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      PostgreSQL's biggest disadvantage over MariaDB is that it's not a drop-in replacement for MySQL.

    3. Re: and so meanwhile... by Simon+Brooke · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The real joke of this is that Postgres has been, by any measure, a better database than MySQL for twenty years. Back in the early 1990s when we were running on i386s and Sparcs, there was some argument for using MySQL because (in those days) the fact that it didn't have proper transactions and proper reverential integrity, it was faster for simple queries from single tables. Now, even that isn't true any more. Postgres is just the best engineered RDBMS out there bar none, and it's free.

      --
      I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
    4. Re: and so meanwhile... by buchner.johannes · · Score: 5, Funny

      Maybe Postgres lacks discoverability?

      --
      NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
    5. Re: and so meanwhile... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How did MySQL get such critical mass?

      Probably the main reason is that it has a "design philosophy" of "if you can't do what the user wants, better to do something and say it's all OK than to give an error", which some people mistake for ease of use.

    6. Re: and so meanwhile... by SQLGuru · · Score: 5, Funny

      BetaMax vs VHS. Blu-ray vs HD-DVD.

      Obviously it's because the porn industry chose MySQL.

    7. 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.

    8. Re: and so meanwhile... by hibiki_r · · Score: 5, Insightful

      MySQL got its critical mass by it's easy, tight integration built into PHP. Any random college student could build a website backed by a database pretty quickly. It was a total failure to anyone that wanted to do serious work with it, but serious work was never an issue. As those college students entered the workforce, they tried to keep the tools they learned. People worked around their tech's limitations until new versions added it in, instead of migrating to competitors.

      So it was a perfect storm or filling a niche for a community that just kept growing.

    9. Re:and so meanwhile... by greg1104 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      As long as MariaDB is requiring copyright assignment, there's every reason to believe it will be sold off again the same way MySQL was. The FSF gets away with that for GNU projects because they've never abused contributor trust before. Monty is no FSF, and there's no reason believe MariaDB will remain outside of commercial control any better than MySQL did. I can't believe people are falling for the same trick again.

      PostgreSQL aims for SQL standards conformance as much as possible. It's hard sometimes due to the difficulty of participating in the standard process. The idea that MySQL does a better job in that area is kind of odd though. You'll have to list some sample Postgres "oddities" to be credible with that claim.

    10. Re:and so meanwhile... by greg1104 · · Score: 5, Funny

      PostgreSQL's biggest disadvantage over MariaDB is that it's not a drop-in replacement for MySQL.

      Postgres has a blackhole engine that loses data in unpredictable ways now. But that only emulates parts of MyISAM.

    11. Re:and so meanwhile... by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What I don't get is this...why does anybody think MariaDB is ANY safer? I mean its still run by old Monty, right? The guy that sold MySQL out from under the community to Oracle in the first place? And don't he still require that ALL code contributed have the rights signed over to him?

      If he fools you once? Shame on him. If he fools you twice? You are an idiot that deserve what you get.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. 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.

  3. Re:"Will businesses needlessly give away money?" by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because the managers who select databases are buying ass-coverage. Performance and cost are secondary considerations.

  4. 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.

  5. Reverential integrity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    One entire Billy Graham at a time?

  6. Postgresql real problem by petermp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I personally think that the real problem with Postgresql happened 10 years ago. At that time it was not possible to run Postgresql on Windows(it was only possible via cygwin). That helped mysql get critical mass and Postgresql stayed behind. Then the snowball effect came into play and mysql was getting much more users compared to Postgresql.