MySQL CEO Insists He's Not Supping With The Devil 197
jg21 writes "In the continuing saga of the decision by MySQL previously discussed here on Slashdot to make a deal with SCO Group, the company's CEO Marten Mickos has now granted an interview in which he addresses the inevitable criticism that the deal has provoked in the F/OSS community. His main defense seems to be that other companies have ported to SCO too. He admits money too played a part." From the article: "We believe that porting a GPL version of MySQL for the SCO OpenServer platform gives thousands of users more options when it comes to choosing a database -- which is a good thing. The deal produces revenue for us and this allows us to hire more open
source developers. We didn't make the decision lightly; we knew SCO was a sensitive subject with the free software and open source communities."
Re:Supping? (Score:1, Informative)
When you sup with the devil, you should bring a long spoon (or other variants).
Google reference to its use in the 14th century, here. [phrases.org.uk]
It is used to mean that one should take care to distance oneself from corruption, in case you suffer for it. It sometimes has an added part to the effect of "or you may become the meal".
Re:His software's free, and that's good enough (Score:5, Informative)
Which is technically more advanced? PostgreSQL or MySQL? Which is more Free? Which costs less? In every case the answer is PostgreSQL. So I agree with you.
And I suggest you take a better look at PHP, how widely used it is, and the heavyweights that are using it, before calling it 'inferior'.
As someone who regularly programs in Perl, Python, and PHP, I would say that PHP is incredibly advanced for niche applications (preprocessing text/html/xml files) and not advanced at all for anything else. It always feels extremely kludgy in areas like GUI programming or general purpose scripting (both Perl and Python are better fits here), but if you want a program that generates, say a config file, PHP is not a bad fit.
Part of the problem with MySQL though is that it achieved earlier popularity for two reasons:
1) Its main FOSS competitor, PostgreSQL was a bear to use in the 6.5 days and
2) MySQL being a for-profit company was able to leverage centralized marketing.
However, many key features were missing from MySQL early on including any semblence of ACID compliance (still not really there in 4.x in that the consistancy and integrity factors are still not nearly complete). Secondly Date's Central Rule still does not apply to 5.0 in that strict mode can always be turned off (even by a client app), so data integrity constraints can be circumvented by applications. For those of us who understand what an RDBMS is supposed to do both mathematically and business-wise, MySQL is a case of asking for trouble.
At the same time, PostgreSQL has solved nearly every usability issue it had in the 6.5 days. Right now debate seems to center around what the standard says about padding and collating sequences, case folding, and handling space padding of char variables in concatenation. No more wishing you could drop a column from a table (you could not prior to 7.3, I think). As of 8.1 the last major usability issues will be *gone* from PostgreSQL. I refer of course to the requirement to vacuum. autovacuum is now part of the backend process. And xid wraparound is solved too. A warning is automatically generated when xid's start to run out, and the rdbms is now smart enough to shut down rather than let it roll over and cause data loss (this almost never happened, because on nearly any production database, performance would dictate vacuuming long before this would become an issue). At the same time, I am not aware of anything that MySQL can do that PostgreSQL can't do as well. For example:
1) 8.1 will have TPC, and the JDBC driver will support XA
2) Replication/clustering possible using add-ons like Slony and PgPool or PgCluster.
3) If you need access to external servers/table types/etc. there is DBI-Link which is a subset of the SQL/MED standard.
4) Daisy chaining triggers
Re:His software's free, and that's good enough (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, it serves the needs of a very large market. It was built from the ground up for use in dynamic web sites, it's integration with MySQL is quite good, it is readily extendable, and it's easy to learn. It's also a safe language. This is something that shared hosting companies love. They can give their customers the flexibility to run their own programs without much worry of a server-wide breach. On a properly configured server, a badly coded application can only cause problems for the user running it.
Re:And sit back... (Score:2, Informative)
I recently build a webshop. I used MySQL for the main article databases and sqlite for the shopping carts and ordering information. This works very well and very fast, even on our slightly underpowered webserver.