Skip to main content

Death Knell for MySQL

Someone asked me, "What do you think about the Oracle/Sun buyout as it pertains to MySQL?" Well, since you're asking...

I thought it was bad for MySQL when Sun bought them despite what others were saying at the time. It turns out I was right. I think Oracle will be worse, and this time the blogosphere are saying it'll probably be bad. Now the question is, just how bad will it be? Here's my predictions:
  • I'm sure Oracle realizes they need to tread lightly on the subject of MySQL or else risk the wrath of the open source community. They may integrate some of MySQL to improve Oracle, but they won't promote the continued development of MySQL proper (Berkeley DB anyone?). That is, Oracle won't actively kill MySQL, but they'll let continue to languish the slow and painful death that began before Sun came along. I don't see a financial benefit to Oracle for keeping MySQL healthy. If MySQL does survive, it might be branded as "Oracle Lite."

  • Core developers will continue work on MySQL in the form of Drizzle, a fork based on MySQL 6.0. Drizzle's focus is on refactoring the MySQL code base and scaling down the feature set-- views, triggers, stored procedures, etc. will be available through modules but not in the core-- to providing a fast and efficient RDBMS for web-based and distributed applications. Drizzle will become very popular as a MySQL alternative for dedicated community members and web developers, and enterprise users who require a larger feature set will migrate to PostgreSQL (and Pythonistas rejoice en masse).
If a commercial company buys control of an open-source project, but then the project's community and core developers fork the codebase and continue development, then the company has effectively only purchased rights to a particular branch. It's legal, but it's not a palatable situation for commercial corporations who might be looking to buy up open source applications. I doubt we'll see Oracle starting a SCO-like court battle over MySQL... but we sure are living in interesting times. Welcome to the era of new law.

I'm primarily a PHP developer so I'll most likely migrate to Drizzle if and when that time comes. A lot of what I do could probably be done with SQLite, but I don't particularly care for the way SQLite does some things. That's another story for another day...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing a Minimal PSR-0 Autoloader

An excellent overview of autoloading in PHP and the PSR-0 standard was written by Hari K T over at PHPMaster.com , and it's definitely worth the read. But maybe you don't like some of the bloated, heavier autoloader offerings provided by various PHP frameworks, or maybe you just like to roll your own solutions. Is it possible to roll your own minimal loader and still be compliant? First, let's look at what PSR-0 mandates, taken directly from the standards document on GitHub : A fully-qualified namespace and class must have the following structure \<Vendor Name>\(<Namespace>\)*<Class Name> Each namespace must have a top-level namespace ("Vendor Name"). Each namespace can have as many sub-namespaces as it wishes. Each namespace separator is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR when loading from the file system. Each "_" character in the CLASS NAME is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . The "_" character has no special ...
6 comments
Read more

What's Wrong with OOP

Proponents of Object Oriented Programming feel the paradigm yields code that is better organized, easier to understand and maintain, and reusable. They view procedural programming code as unwieldy spaghetti and embrace OO-centric design patterns as the "right way" to do things. They argue objects are easier to grasp because they model how we view the world. If the popularity of languages like Java and C# is any indication, they may be right. But after almost 20 years of OOP in the mainstream, there's still a large portion of programmers who resist it. If objects truly model the way people think of things in the real world, then why do people have a hard time understanding and working in OOP? I suspect the problem might be the focus on objects instead of actions. If I may quote from Steve Yegge's Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns : Verbs in Javaland are responsible for all the work, but as they are held in contempt by all, no Verb is ever permitted to wander about ...
9 comments
Read more

Learning Prolog

I'm not quite sure exactly I was searching for, but somehow I serendipitously stumbled upon the site learnprolognow.org a few months ago. It's the home for an introductory Prolog programming course. Logic programming offers an interesting way to think about your problems; I've been doing so much procedural and object-oriented programming in the past decade that it really took effort to think at a higher level! I found the most interesting features to be definite clause grammars (DCG), and unification. Difference lists are very powerful and Prolog's DCG syntax makes it easy to work with them. Specifying a grammar such as: s(s(NP,VP)) --> np(NP,X,Y,subject), vp(VP,X,Y). np(np(DET,NBAR,PP),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y), pp(PP). np(np(DET,NBAR),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y). np(np(PRO),X,Y,Z) --> pro(PRO,X,Y,Z). vp(vp(V),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y). vp(vp(V,NP),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y), np(NP,_,_,object). nbar(nbar(JP),X,3) --> jp(JP,X). pp(pp(PREP,N...
22 comments
Read more