Oracle and MySQL -- Good Move or Bad Bet? 226
sendai-X writes "With the recently announced purchase of Innobase, Oracle has shown it's intention to further support open source. This is key as open source enters the mainstream in business and in light of the success IBM has had with the Eclipse project, and Sun recently looking at purchasing PostgresSQL. What do Slashdot users think about this merger? Is it beneficial to the market and database users by having the largest database vendor openly support MySQL and provide an upgrade path to Oracle? Or is it just another cog in the Oracle machine in their attempt to dominate the enterprise IT market? Will this change the database market landscape? Will it help or hurt IBM and Microsoft?"
Possible Conspiracy Theory (Score:3, Interesting)
Well... Is it possible that Oracle "bought" Innobase is to "kill" MySQL (the company)? Look at this: MySQL allied with SCO, which is to me like a poisoning tactic. If there were legal battles, Oracle would likely win. When this is the case, SCO/MySQL alliance roll out. If they lost, Oracle will develop InnoDB using GPL license only, forcing SCO/MySQL to roll out in either case. When MySQL the company is over, Oracle abandon InnoDB with one less (albeit lesser) competitor.
Though you might argue that someone in the future will pick up MySQL code, I'd say that it's less likely. It's far easier to switch to other alternatives such as PostgreSQL.
Prevents MySQL from lowering standards (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, the type of database practices common among MySQL users, like pushing work into the application, aren't on a trajectory toward Oracle.
Ha! let them (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is that there are two MySQLs. There's 4.1 and lower, which doesn't really support the ANSI SQL standard. You know, wonderful little peeves like 'CROSS JOIN' requires an 'ON' directive because MySQL treats it like an 'INNER JOIN'. Or maybe you want to nest selects that refer to the same table, in a delete statement? Ha. Fat chance.
And then there's MySQL 5.0, which supports all of the garbage in MySQL 4.1 plus a bunch of flags that let you automagically actually support the SQL standard calls. Plus you get triggers, stored procedures, and a pony.
MySQL is prolific, I'll give it that. But its created a cadre of developers who don't know why 'INNER JOIN' is better than just 'select table1,table2', or that string parsing should be done on the application level, not the DB level.
Re:Bad for open source, maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bad for open source, maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
By who? Not by MySQL AB. It takes a long time to make a new community work effectively.
MySQL AB is between a rock and a hard place, I think we can agree here. If Oracle cuts off InnoDB from commercial licensing, MySQL will stop developing/supporting it, it's only a matter of time. They simply can't have a GPL version that's better than their commercial version. Then, without transactions or RI, their "enterprise-ness" and usefulness will be called into question.
So that leaves the community. But the community is too wrapped around MySQL AB to function on it's own just yet. That will take time.
And that time is precisely what Oracle doesn't want MySQL to have. If the development of MySQL DB is set back by 12-18 months, that will surely be a victory for Oracle, who will secure a strong lead ahead of the most popular open source database. The wind will be stolen from the 5.0 release, and another few rounds of businessmen will make long-term commitments to Oracle (in the form of licenses and hardware).
What is the downside to Oracle?
Re:It's beautiful QWZX (Score:3, Interesting)
" Oracle, the world's second largest software giant was recently the
subject of much scrutiny. It was discovered that Oracle had hired a
detective agency, Investigative Group International (IGI), to find out
some dirt on its direct competitor, Microsoft. Essentially, it was
alleged that offers were made to the janitorial staff from the office
of Association for Competitive Technology (ACT). ACT is a trade group,
which is known to be pro-Microsoft [11]. Oracle stated that they hired
IGI to investigate trade groups that were pro-Microsoft during the
anti-trust case involving the world's largest software giant. In
reality, such an investigation would only ultimately hurt Microsoft.
Larry Ellison, chairman of Oracle, was directly involved in funding the
investigation. In fact, this whole scenario has been referred to as
"Larrygate" [10]. "
Re:MySQL speed (Score:3, Interesting)
I personally don't doubt that ShatteredDreams' found MySQL/InnoDB faster then PostgreSQL. I compared MySQL 4.1.12 vs PG 8.0.3 on the exact same hardware using the same data and scripts (basically switched out DBD::mysql for DBD::pg) and found MySQL was over 3x faster for inserts (8 hours vs 28 hours). Why? Because PG is more concerned with data integerity then performance compared to MySQL. I went onto #postgresql and asked about tuning for my environment/dataset and got a lot of help, but wasn't ever able to get any noticible improvement to PG's insert speed without resorting to dropping FK's and indexes or using the COPY command (which makes the whole thing pretty much pointless now doesn't it?).
As it turned out, with a LOT of creative thinking I was able to get the performance to something I could live with (frankly, it's really ugly, but it works and is very specific to our application so it prolly wouldn't be useful for 99.9% of the people out there) so we ended up going with PostgreSQL since it is more robust and has a better feature set (honestly I didn't expect to use triggers or stored proceedures, but they've come in handy a couple of times, especially since we have both Perl and Java code talking to the DB and we only have to impliment certain bits of logic only once).
Honestly, it would be really nice if the PG folks would allow DBA's to be able to do things like turn off WAL for those times when raw speed is more important that data integrity, but that doesn't seem to be a priority.
Re:Purchase PostgreSQL? (Score:4, Interesting)
That kind of nuts and bolts nerd attitude is bad enough with mainstream programming (compilers will never be fast enough, shared objects will never be fast enough, virtual machines will never be fast enough...) but it's lethal to DBMS development.
One of the fundamental principles of the relational model is that you separate your logical constructs from the physical implementation. If anything, using other people's storage software was one of the few things they got right! (Of course, the rest of the time they succumbed to the nuts and bolts nerds and talked about how high they could score on arbitrary benchmarks and how integrity was for sissies, &c &c.)
A DBMS is a *system* and when you design such a system you need to step back from the details of implementation and work out a rigorous, mathematically grounded plan for how it is going to work.
Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux has commodotised the OS. MySQL and perhaps PostGRES are commodotising the Database.
All the money is upstream. Larry's customers are asking him why should they use Oracle, when MySQL et al does what they want. Larry want to sell them his other mojo, and that is where the money is. Why support the database when a bunch of other people will do it for you.
I would not be surprised to see Oracle tech ending up in MySQL, as a gift from Larry.
I too have counted, counted, weighed and measured.
Perhaps real target is SAP ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Slowing down MySQL considerably would be a juicy side-effect.
And others have also mentioned that Oracle should get a 10 out of 10 on the style scale if they were to release the next version of innodb as GPL only, disallowing MySQL AB from dual-licensing it, therefore seriously hampering the precious revenue stream from the MySQL database product. Imagine what MySQL AB's sales department would have to come up with then! Oracle would be true to the hard-core 'free as in speech' OSS folks [ in this case, anyway ], while at the same time hamstringing their commercial competition from MySQL AB, since their business model revolves around commercial licensing, not support contracts. If MySQL AB then switched to a support contact model and released pure-GPL only for the code they actually owned (can't do BDB and the other external table implementations that way -- they don't own the copyrights), then perhaps that potential Oracle move might have the side-effect of actually maing MySQL more free than it currently is.
Posting anonymously since these are all unattributed quotes by more insightful folks. Apologies in advance if I have misquoted -- going from memory here.
Re:Purchase PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is most likely the primary reason that Oracle made their move. SAP actively supports MySQL development, and promotes it (and naturally MaxDB) for use by customers who don't need huge enterprise-scale databases. Oracle and SAP are in fierce competition, and Oracle will most likely do anything they can to get in the way.