My question is, aren't Lagrangian points going to start to get a bit crowded? There are only five to work with in our neighbourhood and who gets to say who uses which and for how long?
Well, that's easy. Disney gets to use the Langrangian points for their newest Disneyuniverse rides. And they get to use them until their copyright on Mickey Mouse runs out.
Woo! You completely tore that guy a new asshole! In such a calm, efficient manner. You are like a ninja of arguments. As this wild, frothing, insane dude rushes you with his arms flailing all around, screaming incoherent jibberish, you calmly step aside and stab him in the kidney with a sword.
That was just beautiful to behold.
I'm in awe. I rarely use this "make person friend" feature of Slashdot, but I gotta use it in this case.
At Digg, we use Nagios to alert (with all the warts that go along with that). We use Cacti to monitor and graph. It's a relatively nice front-end to RRDtool.
I'm the MySQL DBA and I spent a long, long time (in concert with Peter Zaitsev of MySQL AB fame) tweaking the existing Cacti MySQL templates to add InnoDB graphing support (and a new MemcacheD set of graphing templates) and put them all over here: my mysqlUtils page.
I'd never heard of this pair of monitoring/alerting software before. Hopefully it improves on the state of monitoring and alerting, because I feel Nagios and Cacti (and Ganglia) leave a fair bit to be desired.
(By the way, that page includes a fair bit of other utilities, too, not just Cacti templates)
Digg is moderated, but almost entirely by members. Digg employees only remove stories that violate terms of service. As Kevin noted: we need more visibility into the moderation system at Digg. Several Digg stories relating to this whole debacle were removed, but only a couple (one?) by Digg employees. A vast majority of them were removed by Digg members.
We have plans to fix all this, but things are busy right now at Digginc. We're doing our best.
Now, on to an amusing sidenote: Digg was "Slashdotted" when this story came out. Looking at the database statistics (I'm the DBA), I note a marked spike as the Slashdot story was posted. This means that there's definitely a set of Slashdot readers that aren't Digg readers. The good news for all of you is, Slashdot and Digg are fulfilling their separate roles in the tech news sphere. Doesn't look like much danger in one putting the other out of business.
(Some of our vocal members, though, probably hope otherwise. I know there's a set of tech professionals that wish Slashdot would be eliminated by Digg, and probably vice-versa).
Like any profession, database administration is rife with the mediocre and downright incompetent. For those, Oracle and the like provide an awesome service. A DBMS that works half the time, and the half the time it isn't working, there are documents, online knowledge bases, and expensive tech support personnel who can read to you from their CDROMs.
If you really want to know if PostgreSQL (or MySQL) can handle it, look at the best and brightest tech corps in the world. I'll pick two for you: Google and Yahoo!. They use MySQL extensively. IMO PostgreSQL can do whatever MySQL can (though, honestly, I'm not sure, I've only ever seen MySQL in high volume environments like Digg, where I'm currently working).
If your org *NEEDs* Oracle or Sybase or whatever because MySQL and PostgreSQL aren't supported by some software you bought, I feel sorry for you, and recommend you either accept your company's mediocrity or get out.
If you think MySQL/PostgreSQL just don't have what it takes on a fundamental level, I humbly suggest you rethink your competence in the field.
In the US today, abortion is legal, yet when you accidentally terminate a wanted pregnancy through negligent driving it is considered manslaughter. This inconsistency leads to only one conclusion: a fetus is human if and only if its mother wants it. If this is about the beginnings of humanity, how can we not extrapolate this nihilist world view into our own lives? Am I only human because my mother and others continue to love me?
You stumble over the truth, but quickly regain your balance and move on, undaunted.
You are only human if those that interact with you choose to include you in their social cirle or their family. If all humans you interact with choose not to let you in to either, you will cease to be human. A human without social interaction, friends, family, is not human anymore.
Pity them. But if you don't go out of your way to become their friends, or their family, they are merely animals eating from the trough.
With the disclaimer that I work at Digg, what makes you think Digg lacks what Slashdot gives you? At first I lamented the fact that Digg, although cool for its front-page articles, has really crappy comments.
But lately, when I go to a Dugg story with a lot of comments, and read at +1, I get a couple of nice gems.
Plus, Digg gives me a lot more variety. As a many-year Slashdot reader, I'm actually starting to di-- uh, like the website.
Again, I know it's kinda hard to swallow since I'm supposed to be all biased and stuff, but I swear I'm not. It took me several weeks of using Digg before I finally decided I could actually eat my own dogfood.
with "fruity and/or floral notes due to the fermentation of the coffee aroma."
Ah, yes. The fruity and/or floral notes. It has a slightly musky scent wafting on the pallette and... wait. We're talking about a cross between beer and Red Bull here. WTF is it with the high-brow wine vocabulary?! Ah, well. We brought it back down to the college level at the end when we proposed that it was caused by an aroma that ferments.
Pass me some of that weed, dude! My aroma is fermenting!
It is my understanding that SQL Server has been completely rewritten over the years and shares no code with the Sybase "fork" it started with years ago.
Yes. That is what Microsoft told you. However, folks smarter than me have done comparisons long after Microsoft made that statement and found significant portions of identical compiled code, so I'm thinking maybe Microsoft is flinging bullshit around. Not a first.
I'm such a grammar and spelling Nazi. I came back, read my post, and said: "Crap. I sound barely-literate. "Now...can now...?" "Gotcha's?"
And to top it all off, I sound like an arrogant ass-hole.
What I mean to say is I have known a few snobbish DBAs who talk down to MySQL, but then when I look at what they're using Oracle to do, I kind of laugh. Often they're maybe single-terabyte database servers pushing maybe hundreds of transactions per hour.
It gives me no small amount of satisfaction to then go back to the office and watch my database cluster hum. It costs 1/3rd that Oracle installation run by the snobbish asshole DBA. I watch it do about 30x the work that other cluster is doing, and smile.
MySQL is already good. It's only getting better. Keep laughing and being snobbish, Oracle guys. We're eating your lunch.
I've been waiting for years for stored procedures, triggers, and... ah. Wait a minute. No, actually, I've been running multi-terabyte millions-of-transactions-per-hour database clusters with MySQL for about two years now.
Well. Anyway. Now all the little shops that have been making excuses about why not to use MySQL can now start using it.
(In fairness, actually, yes, the MySQL gotcha's page scares me, too)
I read the article. (I'm sorry. I didn't mean to.)
Basically, you could sum it up like this: "We hate Wikipedia. We will attempt to come up with five clever ways of saying so, because we're Brits, damn you."
I'll only laugh at one of their clever witticisms here: an Encyclopedia should be judged on its worst entries, not its best.
Well, that's just awesome. So set up the definition of how something should be judged so this thing (Wikipedia) you obviously hate will lose out. Clue phone for you: ANYONE CAN ADD TO THE WIKIPEDIA. That means that it's going to have at least one uber-crap article.
How about you make a fair comparison, like the average quality of the 50,000 best articles? Oh? Right. That means Wikipedia would win.
- I have my dream job right now because of a community site supported by ads. It is a massive site that is expensive to run simply because of the sheer number of users. I know others that can tell a similar story.
What site is that? You don't have to tell me here, but you can figure out my email address from my account. I'm curious, being as I've worked at a site with the exact same description, and might want to chat about high-volume admin stuff.
The state of litigation in the United States is so bad. I've been very closely involved with another lawsuit where the plaintiff was very SCO-like. In the end, he suffered no real harm in his litigious behaviour. The defendents lost tens of thousands of dollars... to the lawyers.
The judge, even when presented with overwhelming evidence that the case was frivolous, let it go ahead.
From this vantage-point, it looks like the lawyers and judges have set up a system where such litigation is encouraged, and the only winners are... you guessed it, the lawyers and judges.
What you forgot to ask is how his tech savvy cousin (who also does taxidermy and accounting) makes it faster, larger, and redundant. In that case he makes 7 partitions and uses software to do a raid5 setup over the first 6 partitions, using the last one as parity. 428GB with a perfect, online safety net. Pretty smart, huh?
What? No! If you're going to do that, you want to use 5 partitions as data, the 6th as parity, and the 7th as a hot spare, in case any of those other partitions... you know... fail.:P
SCO bought a freakin license to include a copy of MySQL that's not GPL. It's not like SCO bought the company.
Yet MySQL trumpets it very loudly on their web page with a press release that looks like it was written by SCO.
It includes such gems as this one:
"Given that 85 percent of SCO UNIX-based solutions are database applications, it makes complete sense to work more closely with MySQL to jointly certify, market and support our product solutions for the benefit of our mutual customers," said Jeff Hunsaker, senior vice president and general manager, SCO's UNIX division.
That sounds a bit more than Buying a non-GPL copy of MySQL.
That's just one of the many gems from that page on MySQL's own site. I know Brian Aker posted yesterday (or whenever) saying this is just MySQL providing binary builds for SCO, but that press release doesn't match up with his statements (or yours) at all.
Sorry. I'm going to have to play the ad hominem game here. You're just an AC, and your opinion isn't to be trusted.
I've read a few of the replies to this story. It's interesting to read some of the pro-PostgreSQL peoples' opinions. They're rather dated.
The more I learn about MySQL (from the perspective of someone who was initially gung-ho about PostgreSQL), the more I realised the shortcomings of MySQL weren't really shortcomings. They were misunderstandings. Yes, this can sometimes be as bad, when a default option is a stupid option (like table-level locking, as the parent and other PostgreSQL fans complain about).
Then I quit that job and went to work at Friendster, which is also a big MySQL shop. What I learned then was that when used properly, MySQL can scale to amazing proportions. Millions of transactions per hour (I won't be too specific being as I don't want to be sued into oblivion now that I'm an ex-Friendster employee).
Keep in mind that Friendster isn't alone. Google and Yahoo! use MySQL. For production loads. Big, big production loads.
What I didn't like about PostgreSQL was the weird licensing problems. Yes, bizarre as it may be, the BSD license they chose over GPL causes it to be bizarre. You can't get replication without downloading some weird third-party patch and recompiling (because the patch is GPL). Screw that. MySQL has it built in to the supported binaries you get from their site.
Without replication, your DBMS is useless. It's pretty clear from reading the parent post that Michalf doesn't really understand replication. If he did, he might think a moment about his statement that MySQ can't scale to more than 100 users at once. Friendster had millions (at once). Yahoo! has at last estimate nearly a hundred million users at once.
Last I checked PostgreSQL (admittedly, 6-9 months ago?) it just wasn't viable. Really replication was about the only thing holding it up, except I know another engineer who worked extensively with PostgreSQL internals (hacking it up to create a DBMS cluster, actually) and he said their I/O internals were bad/slow. Hopefully he's wrong, but I know before I deploy PostgreSQL I'm going to be carefully benchmarking it before doing so. Keeping in mind that I never deploy an RDBMS in a tiny little "more than 100 users" environment like the parent poster.
Sorry for the long-winded rant. It's just that I've been wishing/hoping/praying PostgreSQL would be the winning RDBMS in this battle for years, and every time I think it's going to be any good, it goes and shoots itself in the foot somehow, which makes me sad. Currently, I'm still a fulltime MySQL DBA.
Caveat: Much of what I've said here only applies in high volume RDBMS environments. If your environment is low volume, PostgreSQL may be a better choice.
I think that the concept of Regional Coding is largely dead now anyway since they tend to release everything at the same time to avoid piracy. Regional Coding was really a violation of WTO rules anyway.
Bullshit. I have sitting right next to me a region-3 (Asias) Incredibles DVD that won't play on my brother-in-law's region-code-conforming DVD player.
He gave it to us because he bought the US version which he can play (and his Chinese-speaking wife will just have to do without the Chinese subtitles).
Meanwhile, I and my Chinese-speaking wife are doing alright, because we use mplayer, which tortuously spends about 5 seconds before playing any title on this DVD cracking the keys ("libdvdread: Get key for/VIDEO_TS/VTS_05_1.VOB at 0x00388655 libdvdread: Elapsed time...").
The MPAA, RIAA, and other evil corporations are not backing down, no matter how much you wish they were.
Sun bought up this office product and open-sourced it and gave it away and gave us an alternative to the Microsoft monopoly.
But besides that, what has Sun ever done for us?
I'm not going to thank them for now moving it to the simple LGPL license. I'm going to damn them anyway. Because... um. Because I like to be constantly pissed off?
Hmm. It does occur to me that post could be seen as flamebait. Allow me to elaborate.
My wife got pregnant and got what apparently is a common problem: diabetes. She controlled it using exercise and diet. Then, after she gave birth the diabetes does what it does when it's pregnancy diabetes: it went away.
Then, about a year later, I changed jobs and decided I wanted to get insurance for her independent of the job, because their insurance was expensive. We answered all the questions on their questionnaire, including the requisite "diabetes" question. We then filled out in the "explanation for 'yes' answers" section a note about how the diabetes was minor and temporary.
They categorically denied to insure her in any way, shape, or form. No "You are qualified for our high-risk" plan or anything, just: "You are uninsurable by us (go to hell)."
So actually we kind of live in the dystopia I described. When I read this story, I wonder to myself "Could this tendency toward diabetes that she got have been detected, and if so, would she have been preemptively cured, or preemptively disallowed from being insured?"
Will we see rapid translation of these pre-clinical observations to prediction and/or stratification of type 1 diabetes and treatment of individuals with the disease? This would provide a crucially needed early predictor of response to therapy.
Perhaps this wonderful new technology will be used by insurance companies to deny your child insurance before the diabetes could possibly cut into their profit margins?
Oracle is state of the art software. State of the art is always a pain in the neck.
As a former Oracle DBA with 3 years of experience: Haaahahahahaa! [wipes tears] Did you say...? Haaahahahahahaaahaha! That's a good one.
MySQL is state of the art. Oracle is state of the cruft.
MySQL has painstakingly removed every little piece of useless code that isn't needed, and tossed it out the window. Then they licensed their code for damn near nothing. Then they provided a support option that actually gives the customer... SUPPORT. From a technological and business standpoint, MySQL is post-2000. Oracle is 1980's.
Slashdot Mirror
Woo! You completely tore that guy a new asshole! In such a calm, efficient manner. You are like a ninja of arguments. As this wild, frothing, insane dude rushes you with his arms flailing all around, screaming incoherent jibberish, you calmly step aside and stab him in the kidney with a sword.
That was just beautiful to behold.
I'm in awe. I rarely use this "make person friend" feature of Slashdot, but I gotta use it in this case.
At Digg, we use Nagios to alert (with all the warts that go along with that). We use Cacti to monitor and graph. It's a relatively nice front-end to RRDtool.
I'm the MySQL DBA and I spent a long, long time (in concert with Peter Zaitsev of MySQL AB fame) tweaking the existing Cacti MySQL templates to add InnoDB graphing support (and a new MemcacheD set of graphing templates) and put them all over here: my mysqlUtils page.
I'd never heard of this pair of monitoring/alerting software before. Hopefully it improves on the state of monitoring and alerting, because I feel Nagios and Cacti (and Ganglia) leave a fair bit to be desired.
(By the way, that page includes a fair bit of other utilities, too, not just Cacti templates)
Digg is moderated, but almost entirely by members. Digg employees only remove stories that violate terms of service. As Kevin noted: we need more visibility into the moderation system at Digg. Several Digg stories relating to this whole debacle were removed, but only a couple (one?) by Digg employees. A vast majority of them were removed by Digg members.
We have plans to fix all this, but things are busy right now at Digginc. We're doing our best.
Now, on to an amusing sidenote: Digg was "Slashdotted" when this story came out. Looking at the database statistics (I'm the DBA), I note a marked spike as the Slashdot story was posted. This means that there's definitely a set of Slashdot readers that aren't Digg readers. The good news for all of you is, Slashdot and Digg are fulfilling their separate roles in the tech news sphere. Doesn't look like much danger in one putting the other out of business.
(Some of our vocal members, though, probably hope otherwise. I know there's a set of tech professionals that wish Slashdot would be eliminated by Digg, and probably vice-versa).
Like any profession, database administration is rife with the mediocre and downright incompetent. For those, Oracle and the like provide an awesome service. A DBMS that works half the time, and the half the time it isn't working, there are documents, online knowledge bases, and expensive tech support personnel who can read to you from their CDROMs.
If you really want to know if PostgreSQL (or MySQL) can handle it, look at the best and brightest tech corps in the world. I'll pick two for you: Google and Yahoo!. They use MySQL extensively. IMO PostgreSQL can do whatever MySQL can (though, honestly, I'm not sure, I've only ever seen MySQL in high volume environments like Digg, where I'm currently working).
If your org *NEEDs* Oracle or Sybase or whatever because MySQL and PostgreSQL aren't supported by some software you bought, I feel sorry for you, and recommend you either accept your company's mediocrity or get out.
If you think MySQL/PostgreSQL just don't have what it takes on a fundamental level, I humbly suggest you rethink your competence in the field.
You stumble over the truth, but quickly regain your balance and move on, undaunted.
You are only human if those that interact with you choose to include you in their social cirle or their family. If all humans you interact with choose not to let you in to either, you will cease to be human. A human without social interaction, friends, family, is not human anymore.
Pity them. But if you don't go out of your way to become their friends, or their family, they are merely animals eating from the trough.
Hmm. You know, this begs the question: "Why am I even replying to an anonymous troll, anyway?"
Your joke is very subtle, and requires multiple readings. But Gandi? Gandi is axiomatically GOOD, because it's a cheap and very ethical registrar.
With the disclaimer that I work at Digg, what makes you think Digg lacks what Slashdot gives you? At first I lamented the fact that Digg, although cool for its front-page articles, has really crappy comments.
But lately, when I go to a Dugg story with a lot of comments, and read at +1, I get a couple of nice gems.
Plus, Digg gives me a lot more variety. As a many-year Slashdot reader, I'm actually starting to di-- uh, like the website.
Again, I know it's kinda hard to swallow since I'm supposed to be all biased and stuff, but I swear I'm not. It took me several weeks of using Digg before I finally decided I could actually eat my own dogfood.
Pass me some of that weed, dude! My aroma is fermenting!
I'm such a grammar and spelling Nazi. I came back, read my post, and said: "Crap. I sound barely-literate. "Now...can now...?" "Gotcha's?"
And to top it all off, I sound like an arrogant ass-hole.
What I mean to say is I have known a few snobbish DBAs who talk down to MySQL, but then when I look at what they're using Oracle to do, I kind of laugh. Often they're maybe single-terabyte database servers pushing maybe hundreds of transactions per hour.
It gives me no small amount of satisfaction to then go back to the office and watch my database cluster hum. It costs 1/3rd that Oracle installation run by the snobbish asshole DBA. I watch it do about 30x the work that other cluster is doing, and smile.
MySQL is already good. It's only getting better. Keep laughing and being snobbish, Oracle guys. We're eating your lunch.
I've been waiting for years for stored procedures, triggers, and... ah. Wait a minute. No, actually, I've been running multi-terabyte millions-of-transactions-per-hour database clusters with MySQL for about two years now.
Well. Anyway. Now all the little shops that have been making excuses about why not to use MySQL can now start using it.
(In fairness, actually, yes, the MySQL gotcha's page scares me, too)
I read the article. (I'm sorry. I didn't mean to.)
Basically, you could sum it up like this: "We hate Wikipedia. We will attempt to come up with five clever ways of saying so, because we're Brits, damn you."
I'll only laugh at one of their clever witticisms here: an Encyclopedia should be judged on its worst entries, not its best.
Well, that's just awesome. So set up the definition of how something should be judged so this thing (Wikipedia) you obviously hate will lose out. Clue phone for you: ANYONE CAN ADD TO THE WIKIPEDIA. That means that it's going to have at least one uber-crap article.
How about you make a fair comparison, like the average quality of the 50,000 best articles? Oh? Right. That means Wikipedia would win.
Dumbasses.
The state of litigation in the United States is so bad. I've been very closely involved with another lawsuit where the plaintiff was very SCO-like. In the end, he suffered no real harm in his litigious behaviour. The defendents lost tens of thousands of dollars... to the lawyers.
The judge, even when presented with overwhelming evidence that the case was frivolous, let it go ahead.
From this vantage-point, it looks like the lawyers and judges have set up a system where such litigation is encouraged, and the only winners are... you guessed it, the lawyers and judges.
What? No! If you're going to do that, you want to use 5 partitions as data, the 6th as parity, and the 7th as a hot spare, in case any of those other partitions... you know... fail.
It includes such gems as this one:That sounds a bit more than Buying a non-GPL copy of MySQL.
That's just one of the many gems from that page on MySQL's own site. I know Brian Aker posted yesterday (or whenever) saying this is just MySQL providing binary builds for SCO, but that press release doesn't match up with his statements (or yours) at all.
Sorry. I'm going to have to play the ad hominem game here. You're just an AC, and your opinion isn't to be trusted.
I've read a few of the replies to this story. It's interesting to read some of the pro-PostgreSQL peoples' opinions. They're rather dated.
The more I learn about MySQL (from the perspective of someone who was initially gung-ho about PostgreSQL), the more I realised the shortcomings of MySQL weren't really shortcomings. They were misunderstandings. Yes, this can sometimes be as bad, when a default option is a stupid option (like table-level locking, as the parent and other PostgreSQL fans complain about).
Then I quit that job and went to work at Friendster, which is also a big MySQL shop. What I learned then was that when used properly, MySQL can scale to amazing proportions. Millions of transactions per hour (I won't be too specific being as I don't want to be sued into oblivion now that I'm an ex-Friendster employee).
Keep in mind that Friendster isn't alone. Google and Yahoo! use MySQL. For production loads. Big, big production loads.
What I didn't like about PostgreSQL was the weird licensing problems. Yes, bizarre as it may be, the BSD license they chose over GPL causes it to be bizarre. You can't get replication without downloading some weird third-party patch and recompiling (because the patch is GPL). Screw that. MySQL has it built in to the supported binaries you get from their site.
Without replication, your DBMS is useless. It's pretty clear from reading the parent post that Michalf doesn't really understand replication. If he did, he might think a moment about his statement that MySQ can't scale to more than 100 users at once. Friendster had millions (at once). Yahoo! has at last estimate nearly a hundred million users at once.
Last I checked PostgreSQL (admittedly, 6-9 months ago?) it just wasn't viable. Really replication was about the only thing holding it up, except I know another engineer who worked extensively with PostgreSQL internals (hacking it up to create a DBMS cluster, actually) and he said their I/O internals were bad/slow. Hopefully he's wrong, but I know before I deploy PostgreSQL I'm going to be carefully benchmarking it before doing so. Keeping in mind that I never deploy an RDBMS in a tiny little "more than 100 users" environment like the parent poster.
Sorry for the long-winded rant. It's just that I've been wishing/hoping/praying PostgreSQL would be the winning RDBMS in this battle for years, and every time I think it's going to be any good, it goes and shoots itself in the foot somehow, which makes me sad. Currently, I'm still a fulltime MySQL DBA.
Caveat: Much of what I've said here only applies in high volume RDBMS environments. If your environment is low volume, PostgreSQL may be a better choice.
Bullshit. I have sitting right next to me a region-3 (Asias) Incredibles DVD that won't play on my brother-in-law's region-code-conforming DVD player.
He gave it to us because he bought the US version which he can play (and his Chinese-speaking wife will just have to do without the Chinese subtitles).
Meanwhile, I and my Chinese-speaking wife are doing alright, because we use mplayer, which tortuously spends about 5 seconds before playing any title on this DVD cracking the keys ("libdvdread: Get key for
The MPAA, RIAA, and other evil corporations are not backing down, no matter how much you wish they were.
"This name was chosen from thousands of recommendations by the community, and even went through an arduous review session by branding and marketing professionals who also felt that Joomla! was the best choice of the lot."
Sun bought up this office product and open-sourced it and gave it away and gave us an alternative to the Microsoft monopoly.
But besides that, what has Sun ever done for us?
I'm not going to thank them for now moving it to the simple LGPL license. I'm going to damn them anyway. Because... um. Because I like to be constantly pissed off?
Hmm. It does occur to me that post could be seen as flamebait. Allow me to elaborate.
My wife got pregnant and got what apparently is a common problem: diabetes. She controlled it using exercise and diet. Then, after she gave birth the diabetes does what it does when it's pregnancy diabetes: it went away.
Then, about a year later, I changed jobs and decided I wanted to get insurance for her independent of the job, because their insurance was expensive. We answered all the questions on their questionnaire, including the requisite "diabetes" question. We then filled out in the "explanation for 'yes' answers" section a note about how the diabetes was minor and temporary.
They categorically denied to insure her in any way, shape, or form. No "You are qualified for our high-risk" plan or anything, just: "You are uninsurable by us (go to hell)."
So actually we kind of live in the dystopia I described. When I read this story, I wonder to myself "Could this tendency toward diabetes that she got have been detected, and if so, would she have been preemptively cured, or preemptively disallowed from being insured?"
Think about it.
Perhaps this wonderful new technology will be used by insurance companies to deny your child insurance before the diabetes could possibly cut into their profit margins?
Sorry. There should be a "cynic" moderation.
Oracle is state of the art software. State of the art is always a pain in the neck.
As a former Oracle DBA with 3 years of experience: Haaahahahahaa! [wipes tears] Did you say...? Haaahahahahahaaahaha! That's a good one.
MySQL is state of the art. Oracle is state of the cruft.
MySQL has painstakingly removed every little piece of useless code that isn't needed, and tossed it out the window. Then they licensed their code for damn near nothing. Then they provided a support option that actually gives the customer... SUPPORT. From a technological and business standpoint, MySQL is post-2000. Oracle is 1980's.