David Axmark Resigns From Sun 229
An anonymous reader writes "From Kay Arno's blog we see that David Axmark, MySQL's Co-Founder, has resigned. This comes on top of the maybe, maybe not, resignation of Monty. We saw earlier this year that Brian Aker, the Director of Architecture, has forked the server to create a web-focused database from MySQL called Drizzle. The MySQL server has been 'RC' now for a year with hundreds of bugs still listed as being active in the 5.1 version.
What is going on with MySQL?"
Re:MySQL sucks (Score:1, Informative)
I have used MySQL for nearly 7 years now. I currently maintain about 30 databases across many servers and operating systems from MS to Linux. Databases as small as 200k to one as large as 900MB....I have never had a single issue with any of them in all that time, ever.
Re:MySQL sucks (Score:3, Informative)
ooh, 900MB. Positively ginormous, that.
Re:MySQL sucks (Score:5, Informative)
there's no need to start dicksizing about the type of databases you manage. no one is claiming that MySQL is the best database management system out there, or that it can handle any kind of application. but for a certain range of applications it's a very capable and well designed database server.
not everyone needs a multi-terabyte database. and the utility of a RDBMS is not defined by database sizes it can handle. MySQL is so popular precisely because most sub-enterprise businesses don't need anything as robust as Oracle. so MySQL is therefore a much more cost-effective solution.
Re:Drizzle? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Drizzle? (Score:5, Informative)
Hi!
We are still working on the first version of Drizzle. While folks are using it, I don't really recommend it at this point. When we feel like it is ready for adoption we will publicly start recommending it.
Cheers,
-Brian
MySQL greetings (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks slashdotters for being passionate about all topics FOSS and MySQL!
David's departure is in all ways amicable, and he will continue to be an ambassador for MySQL and for free and open source software in general. For some time already, David was working only part-time for MySQL. After about 25 years of working on MySQL and the projects that preceded MySQL, he very much deserves do whatever he pleases to.
Marten
SVP Database Group at Sun
(previously CEO of MySQL AB)
Re:Drizzle? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't use stored procedures.
That's a very narrow-minded statement. The application I maintain has an Oracle 10g backend, Pro*C middleware, and a Java fat client. The standard process for an action in the application is to ask the middleware to run a certain stored procedure in an Oracle package.
Given that this application is huge (I'm talking 1000+ tables, some with up to a million rows) and there are at least 1000 concurrent users, it's very convenient to have the logic on the server-side. Any code change to the client requires an outage (to replace the jar file), which is BAD if it's an emergency fix. By putting all the logic (and access to a vast amount of data) server-side, it reduces network traffic, allows easy rollbacks, and allows the support team to apply a fix without an outage.
Some more great things about our setup is that Oracle packages and triggers support networking. We have a publish/subscribe system tied to triggers such that when one user makes a change, it's instantly reflected on every other user's screen.
Obviously this solution isn't best for all situations, but it fits our needs very well. YMMV
Re:That's the power of the open source license. (Score:4, Informative)
Does Sun have a competitive database? I ask because I don't know of any
Re:MySQL sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Actually there is some relevance.
If you needed a database gigabytes in size a few _years_ ago, MySQL would have been a really bad choice (it still is crap, just less so IMO).
For MyISAM:
You would have to configure it to get tables bigger than the default 4GB limit (there's a number of row limit and table size limit). Hope you don't make the new setting too small so you're still working in the place when those run out too
For Innodb:
Before the single file per table, if you're moving about gigabytes of stuff, you end up with one huge multigigabyte innodb table.
For both:
Adding an index was the same as "alter table" and involved making a copy of the table.
So let's say you have a 40GB table and 40GB of space free. No index add for you
Keep in mind if you have plenty of space free making a copy of a 40GB table does take time.
BTW concurrent inserts to an innodb table with an auto increment field were slow till only recently (well allegedly they've fixed that).
Re:Does Sun have a competitive database? (Score:2, Informative)
Sun does not own the Oracle database - Oracle owns the Oracle database. Wow.
- T
Re:That's the power of the open source license. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MySQL greetings (Score:5, Informative)
I think if you ask people who know me, they will say that I stand for transparency and truthfulness.
If the departure had not been amicable, I guess I would not have commented on it at all, or I would have focused my commentary on whatever other positive aspect I could find.
But the best may be to ask David directly. I don't want to publish his email address here, but it is not difficult to guess. Most early employees of MySQL AB, like myself, use firstname at mysql dot com.
Marten
P.S. Generally I am somewhat perplexed by the attention this topic is getting. The beauty of open source is that you can be actively contributing and participating in your favourite project whether you are employed by a certain company or not. So what's the big deal about David choosing not to be employed? He is not abandoning MySQL. With the enormous payout from the acquisition, the founders can now allow themselves to pursue whatever interests and daily routines they like. Good for them, and I think we should all just be happy that open source can provide not just software freedom but also financial freedom. Just my 2c.
Re:MySQL sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Youre joking right? PostgreSQL supports several replication engines which works fantastic great and it has been doing that for years!
You have:
PGCluster
Slony-I
DBBalancer
pgpool
PostgreSQL table comparator
SkyTools
Sequoia
You can read about what Skype use replication for PostgreSQL here:
https://developer.skype.com/SkypeGarage/DbProjects/SkypePostgresqlWhitepaper [skype.com]
And Slony for example is developed by Jan Weick, a PostgreSQL core team member.
David Axmark (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of press about a not to large event. I have been working less with MySQL over the past several years (as the company has grown). And when we got acquired we got to big for me (I like to know everyone in a company).
A huge part of my work have been spreading FreeSoftware/OpenSource and I will continue to do that. And tell about the MySQL story many times more hoping to inspire others to try to start FLOSS businesses.
And I hope to meet many of all the people who made MySQL such a sucess many times over the coming years. /David (who posts so seldom he does not remember his slash login/password..)
Re:MySQL greetings (Score:5, Informative)
If you look around there are couple of articles that quote David on why he is leaving. It is perfectly amicable, he just dislikes paperwork and would prefer to not deal with it.
-Brian
Re:MySQL greetings (Score:5, Informative)
And so he did. See elsewhere on this thread the posting with subject "David Axmark" and ID (#25309745).
Marten
Re:That's the power of the open source license. (Score:3, Informative)
Sun have offered support for PostgreSQL for a few years now. The version of PostgreSQL they ship has a number of Solaris-specific tweaks that integrate with their other buzzwords.
With regard to MySQL, forking is difficult. MySQL is GPL'd, including the client library. This means that any application that uses it (by linking against the client library) must be GPL'd, or must by a proprietary license (previously from MySQL AB, now from Sun). Postgres, on the other hand, is BSD licensed, meaning you can use any license you want for your code.
Re:Drizzle? (Score:3, Informative)
You go talk to EnterpriseDB, who've been working on Oracle compatibility for Postgres. I can't speak for it personally, but you might be able to get away with the cost of a conversion project to a similar database (read: close, but not equal). At that point, it's pure savings.
Oracle has features PG doesn't have, sure, but ask yourself: how many of them are you actually using? Of the one's you're using, can they be done differently -- maybe by tying in a different FOSS project or home-growing a solution? If you "think outside the box" a little, I think you'll find that those features are generally nice to have, but not really worth the million bucks a year you're paying to have them, and by applying different solutions, you probably won't lose much functionality anyway.
Is that true for everyone, no. I'm sure someone will tell me about their absolutely necessary Oracle-only feature that they're using, but the fact is that there are lots of projects on Oracle could have used MySQL and not lost anything.
Re:Drizzle? (Score:2, Informative)
In these, the same guy who writes Java writes stored procedures. I've seen some pretty horrific SQL in my time - manual "joins" using cursors, for example - but at least they were in stored procedures to optimize performance. (?!)
But at least the DB code can be reviewed and re-written without touching a line of code in the application.
Re:MySQL sucks (Score:3, Informative)
No I'm not kidding.
PostgreSQL does not support any of these, they are all add on.
EnterpriseDB supports slony... http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgres_plus/replication.do [enterprisedb.com]
Re:Oracle also took down Berkeley DB (Score:1, Informative)
Yeah, really buried. One google search for "berkeley db" leading to the product page, from which multiple links take you to a page with a big shiny red "download" button. In other words, it's as accessible as it was from Sleepycat. Oracle's site search sucks, so I can understand why one might think it buried.
Now what they have buried is all the docs from companies they bought, bringing them under their crappy doc portal using a redirect, with the same crappy search.
Re:MySQL greetings (Score:1, Informative)
Handy link: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=989907&cid=25309745 [slashdot.org] (anonymous post since otherwise I'm karma whoring)
Re:Oracle also took down Berkeley DB (Score:1, Informative)
Oracle has release several updates to Berkley DB, version 4.7 of the DB, 3.3 of the java edition and 2.4 of the XML DB have all been released in the last few months. This is the second or third update that I can remember from Oracle on the Berkley front. I guess they are just quiet about it.
Re:That's the power of the open source license. (Score:3, Informative)
Your post seems to think that Oracle and Sun teamed up to kill MySQL. You want proof that Sun has done something to help MySQL along since it bought it.
My "Proof" is comes from that of a Java developer, one that uses almost all Sun tools (Netbeans, Glassfish, EJB3, WebServices and would consider Sun hardware if we could). The freaking day Sun "bought" the company that sold support for MySQL they started to push it as "their" default database of choice. Within a few days they had tutorials up on how to integrate MySQL in to your project. That is definitely an act of a company that doesn't want to KILL a product.
Sun has appeared to leave MySQL alone and to be honest the people who stared it are generally the type of people who HATE large companies and wanted to get back in to a smaller starup type company.
So why did Sun buy MySQL? In my opinion they needed to add it to their software stack. Look at their competition and tell me who doesn't have all of the following (OS, Database, Application Server, Development Tools)
Microsoft, IBM, Oracle.
So "if" Sun wanted to compete with those listed above they needed to do something. NONE of those companies were going to recommend Sun hardware any more. Specifically Oracle who now is in love with their own version of Linux.
Now Oracle buying Inodb to kill or hurt MySQL... We totally agree on that one. The thought of a company like Sun giving away software to sell hardware doesn't bode well for companies like Microsoft or Oracle.