Sun Buys MySQL

Krow alerted me that MySQL has been bought by Sun. Right now there is only a brief announcement but it discusses what the acquisition will mean for the core developers, community etc.

Only one question

[pieterh]

Will it blend?

Not that I distrust Sun's motives when it comes to free software. I mean they did a stellar job on OpenOffice.org, didn't they?

Re:Here is the PR

[icke]

It would be interesting to see how this might stress their relationship with Oracle. So are we heading back to the days of a vertically integrated "stack"? I doubt it. More likely they will jettison the hardware business and concentrate on software.

Hopefully

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully they will make PostgreSQL the default database engine and just add a MySQL legacy layer on top of it. Sun already has great PostgreSQL support, so it's not such a strange suggestion. Maybe that way MySQL will get ACID support this century.

Re:Licenses

[Martian_Kyo]

mysql license is real mess, it can be interpreted in so many ways.

It would make MySQL easier to deploy...

[hughk]

I have worked at a lot of big banks. Open Source has been slowly finding its way in, but it is incredibly difficult to deploy an open source database like MySQL or Postgres. The banks says they want safety and security - and you answer that your database isn't enterprise critical so why pay for Oracle? Management then says, ah well, how about MS SQL Server....

Licensing

[sribe]

Wow, MySQL owned by a company that doesn't lie about the GPL! This is welcome news!

Another sale this morning - BEA to Oracle

[(H)elix1]

Short version - Oracle offered 19.23 or so, and BEA said yes this morning. Big impact on a lot of Java EE developers out there.

Re:Great news!!

[b100dian]

I think it's long-term bye-bye LAMP, since Sun may "empower" MySQL with Java stored procedures, may obfuscate the documentation(like Oracle does), or remove the transactions altogether and replace them with soft ones (JTA),... or anything you can expect (if you've seen a Java programmer using 1% of databases' features..)

Re:Im a sun employee

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Sun will fire the idiots who said that RI, ACID, Triggers, and Stored Procedures aren't necessary for a real database. One can hope.

Re:Sun?

[teknopurge]

Sun is the 2000 version of Bell Labs.

Google just makes beta applications.

Regards,

Re:Here is the PR

[div_2n]

Hopefully they are starting to realize the real value in offering software virtually for free but charging for the support. You get a lot more regular paying customers if they can pay a very affordable annual cost for continued support vs paying some stupid high software cost up front. Many opportunities are missed because of the sticker shock for SMBs.

Re:Hopefully

[Jeppe Salvesen]

MySQL is already ACID. Unlike PostgreSQL, MySQL supports several storage engines - with InnoDB, DBD and Cluster providing ACID. MySQL has indeed supported ACID, subqueries and such since 2005.

It's disheartening to see these kinds of posts get modded as insightful in 2008. Aren't we supposed to be dynamic, informed folks?

The Dot in .com

[PineHall]

From the blog it looks like Sun is trying to own a complete web solution. The blog makes a big deal out of getting the 'M' in LAMP. I think they want to be known as the dot in .com again, the place to go for web solutions.

Re:Dificult to say...

[jimicus]

ESR was on the nail. You can't defeat open source by buying the company IF the product has enough people who care about it enough to maintain it, have the appropriate expertise and aren't employed by the company.

There are a lot of important open source projects for which at least one of the above requirements is not true.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Yes they all work like slaves

[TheGratefulNet]

the benefits are only there on the surface.

but what good are they if you are bound and 'forced' to work until 9pm each nite? or made to feel guilty if you DON'T stay for dinner and work a few hours after that.

all for the SAME PAY.

yes, its a slave life. you'll understand that when you get older (no insult intended; I didn't realize this until I hit over 40, myself.)

Re:Im a sun employee

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that Java thing never really took off...

Re:It would make MySQL easier to deploy...

[hughk]

The banks are really allergic to deploying stuff from smaller vendors. The CTO in a bank tends to be really risk averse (yes, strange whilst his colleagues are pissing the bank's money away on dodgy loans and derivatives). It has been very difficult to deploy Linux but it has sort-of become possible over the years (typically RHEL or sometimes SUSE). Personally, I can see the benefit of major databases, but they get expensive when what you are looking for is a light-weight data store and you really don't want the overhead of an enterprise database. Sun is still big and they still sell a lot of backend servers in banks.

Re:Hopefully

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Which MySQL do you use?

Read up [mysql.com]. Disable autocommits, issue a BEGIN TRANSACTION, and make sure you check the success of all queries before you perform that COMMIT.

Re:I wonder

[Robert The Coward]

Spoken like someone who doesn't work in IT. I get request the day stuff is suppose to start with the users IDEA of what should work. Not requirements or information and what needs to be done then I get weeks of little issues tiring to make this Square Peg fit into a round whole until I figure out what is going on and replace it with something that works. The problem is IT is the last step in the process not the 1st step and that will always cause issues. Sometime we just can't do what the user thinks is simple. Just this week I had a issue with someone deciding that email made a good real time alert system from an external customer. Problem email isn't real time and/or reliable. So every hick up in email is an issue. If IT was consult we could have either a)set the expection or b)developed sometime that was real time and reliable they could use.

Re:I wonder

[ericlondaits]

Actually, from my experience as a programmer I'd much rather have someone come with a spreadsheet he worked with for a year, and very specific requirements such as "we want some people to be able to see these fields, some people to be able to edit these columns" and so... than to have someone with a vague notion of what he needs and then turning that into a relational database. Even if spreadsheets seem awful, a year's user experience with a fast prototyping tool (i.e. the spreadsheet) is priceless.

Re:Not a rash move

[Weslee]

PostgreSQL has 7 -core developers, one of those works at Sun.

While Sun didn't buy any of the PostgreSQL companies, they do provide support and developers - the same as the others.
I doubt their support of PostgreSQL will lessen any.

The two database communities are not comparable.

MySQL is run by a central company.
PostgreSQL is run by the community, with companies growing up around it offering additional features and support (of which Sun is one of them).

What will happen is MySQL, the company, is shut down?
This I don't know.

I do know what will happen if the companies around PostgreSQL go away?
Its happened before. - PostgreSQL continues.

If anything from my point of view this is better for MySQL.
It stops companies like Oracle from being able to control the only company that truly controls MySQL.

Re:Great news

[Henkc]

Exactly, nor does it support industry standard SQL elements. MySQL hops around like a hobbled horse, with the authors claiming a fourth leg isn't needed to be a true RDBMS... Utter crap.

Re:Yes they all work like slaves

[Attaturk]

the benefits are only there on the surface. but what good are they if you are bound and 'forced' to work until 9pm each nite? or made to feel guilty if you DON'T stay for dinner and work a few hours after that. all for the SAME PAY. yes, its a slave life.

I'm not entirely sure you know what slavery is.

SQLite Gui_

[xtracto]

Yup, I think SQLite is a great alternative against Access, however could someone suggest a good GUI for SQLite with similar properties as MS Access? I am not looking for a clone but a program in which my mom could make her simple databases without knowing SQL programming language. Access allows her to do that, but if I want to migrate to Linux there is no alternative. I know that the guys at KDE have some nice apps in developemnt, but I am looking for an application in the lines of "mature" sourceforge status.

Re:SQLite Gui_

[misleb]

Question: Does your mom effectively use MS Access now?

I would question whether it is even possible to make a GUI for any database that a) is easy to use, b) provides enough options to make a wide variety of applications, and c) requires no knowledge of SQL or database design. This is one of those "pick two" situations. Even Access requires a fair amount of skill to use properly... far more than Word or Excel. And even with a modicum of skill, databases produced in MS Access tend to be horrible abominations. What could a SQLite GUI do better?

-matthew

Re:Licenses

[photon317]

I agree about PostgreSQL being a better option for so many reasons (and this new Sun thing is just yet another on the list). The only thing PostgreSQL really needs is some kind of asynch multimaster replication. That's one place where you can get "forced" to use MySQL because Pg can't do what you need. MySQL's implementation of asynch multimaster replication sucks anyways, I'm sure the Pg community can do it better eventually.

Back to the topic at hand though, one way around the libmysqlclient GPL thing is to insulate yourself in a dynamic language where your code doesn't explicitly "link" with libmysqlclient. If you're using Perl (or any other similar language I would assume), DBD::mysql links to libmysqlclient.a, but your own Perl application can be whatever license you like and just "use DBI" (and DBD::mysql indirectly), which is not linking.

Re:Great news!!

[b100dian]

How is adding Java stored procedures a bad thing?
First, because it will make easier for developers to put more application logic in the database.
Second, because a native compiled stored procedure (native, that is, to the DBMS) would be faster
But mostly, because free hosting which maintains something based on Java it's like.. not there.

And you have to admit that free hosting w/ MySQL is one of the reasons LAMP developers are so many, and LAMP is successful

Sure you can use only CRUD operations and do everything in the middle or client tier but it's not always the most efficient.
Exactly my point. But moving the bytecode from the middle tier into the database makes no difference either.

Re:I wonder

[jorgeleon]

Who needs meaningful filenames and directories when you have grep?

Actually, he has a point.

One of the best features, to my taste, of gmail is that I can quickly find an email with a specific content regardless of the subject. Same thing with files if they are full content indexed.

And that is the way that humans naturally work: "I know what I am looking for, I just don't know where I put it (nor I care where it was)". The folders and file names paradigm is an emulation of the paper archival model. Classes are tough on how to create a mantain one (bookeeping, library, secretaries).

You see, this "order" force us to keep to pieces of information in our head: What is it and where is it. And to use one to get the other.

Of course anyone can create a simple filing system, but it requires some level of self disipline to keep it.

And is not intuitive.

I know what I want... just fetch it!

Re:I wonder

[strong_epoxy]

Spoken like someone who's just entered high school.

The last people anyone wants to talk to about ad-hoc projects is IT. An employee has a need, they fill it with a reasonable tool. Per the GP post, the initial requirements were simple and the solution sufficient. No IT department needed. As the utility of the system increased, so did the requirements, and so must the solution space expand requiring IT assistance. IT should then be eager to help and congratulatory on the success of the solution to date.

It's impossible to divine the future requirements of any system, or even it's success. That's why we iterate.

Re:I wonder

[epine]

Actually, from my experience as a programmer I'd much rather have someone come with a spreadsheet he worked with for a year, and very specific requirements such as "we want some people to be able to see these fields, some people to be able to edit these columns" and so... than to have someone with a vague notion of what he needs and then turning that into a relational database. Even if spreadsheets seem awful, a year's user experience with a fast prototyping tool (i.e. the spreadsheet) is priceless.

I totally agree, as far as your post goes.

OTOH, fast prototyping can just as easily cause a lot problems. By the time you reach the natural limits of the prototype, who pays to extract the data into a preservation format? Did anybody even ask before the "fast" prototype was slapped together whether the data being captured will ultimately require preservation in a properly thought through archival structure? And if so, was this conversion budgeted ahead of time, or does it just show up as a problem further down the road, and effectively bite a chunk out of the IT dept. budget that should have been allocated to a business activity?

I've always believed one of the golden rules of foresight is "whoever created the mess, fixes the mess". In any situation where this rule is violated (e.g. the person creating the mess doesn't have the skillset to fix the mess), maybe some careful up-front design trumps the retrospective knowledge benefits of a fast prototype.

Re:I wonder

[NoOneInParticular]

[gasp]. You actually expect that Sun of all companies would be able to put a decent GUI on top of anything? Okay, well, Oracle's got an ever worse track record w.r.t. GUIs, but Sun takes a good second place. Even with a 13 year lead in the managed application space, they are only now taking the Java GUI seriously.

Be realistic. The path MySQL is going down now would involve configuration and editing through countless sets of webservers, various inaptly layers ending on the word 'bean', 200 xml configuration files, a couple of extra layers of abstraction thrown in the API, just because they can, and only with an additional quad core PC with 16 Gigs of RAM you can only work with your one-core 64 Mb instance of MySql.

Re:Great news

[smchris]

I started with C/S on Oracle too and I've noticed that. I think it's one reason I like PostgreSQL and find MySQL annoying. So why do people like MySQL? Is it familiar to people who started with SQL Server or something? Or just the first db they encountered when they picked up a LAMP book?

Re:Does anyone know why is my karma rated as terri

[Anonymous Coward]

What the h*ll is going on with the modders? Why are you modding down the people who criticize the FP troll? Mod them up.

Comments simply complaining about trolls, flamers, off-topicers and redundant posters simply adds more noise to the already deafening sound of useless posts on Slashdot.

(Yes I am aware of the irony of doing the very thing I am criticizing but I will break my own rule just this once because this appears to be forgotten these days on Slashdot)

You've heard it said before I'm sure - IGNORE THE TROLLS! etc. etc.

Re:I wonder

[cuban321]

who needs meaningful filenames and directories when you have grep?

Who needs grep when you have spotlight?

Re:I wonder

[mwanaheri]

For real. What's wrong with keeping addresses in a spreadsheet?

Well, nothing much -- as long as you don't have many friends. Even most address-databases suck, however, if it comes to people having several addresses including phones, mobile phones etc. Or if you want a convenient way of writing letters, stuff like that.
While I find it amazing for how many purposes you can (mis-)use spreadsheeds, having spreadsheets mailed to me with information not including any calculating ruins my day. It's pseudo-structured information. Reminds me of the mails I get when people send me an 'oh-so-funny' picture -- in a msword document.

Re:I wonder

[zurtle]

Actually there is stil an immense use for Excel in data processing. As a mathematician, I find Excel excellent for very-short-term data analysis projects. If you need to put the data in a database... you can always dump the whole spreadsheet.

Excel generates graphs very quickly, has quite a powerful set of numerical analysis functions and just works.

Databases aren't the answer when you want fast results.

Re:I wonder

[rmerry72]

No, we need personal database software. The terabytes of data that homes will soon be accumulating require a better storage solution than a spreadsheet.

We do: we have MS Access.

Its a fabulous low-end database GUI built on a fairly robust RDMS engine for low volume usages. Best thing is every Windows 2000\XP\2003+ machine has ODBC drivers built in (not sure about Vista). Easy to build your own little apps or more advanced VB/.NET interfaces if your inclined. Hell, I built a J2EE shared calendar and multi-media catalog using an Access database as a start and it has worked butifully for the last 5 years.

Not on the same level as PostGres or (arguably MySQL) or a commercial RDMS but a great step up from a spreadsheet. Been around about as long too.

Re:I wonder

[kcbrown]

Well, as long as we are on the subject, how about the overuse of SQL databases for non-relational information? MySQL is no beast, but in my company, there is a SQL Server on almost every box and many of them are storing stuff that is non-relational and could be accessed more quickly in a direct access file.

"Accessed more quickly"?

Maybe. But there are advantages to storing it in a SQL database:

1. If you suddenly have to relate your data to other data that's already in the database, you don't need to do a lot of extra work to make it happen. Namely, you don't suddenly have to convert the original data to a database, rewrite the app to work with it, etc.
2. You don't have to write code to parse the data into fields, etc., because the database already hands it to you that way.
3. Searching is relatively painless -- just use the appropriate WHERE clause. Even full-text indexing can be had for "free" if the database supports it and you use it.
4. Performance tuning becomes a matter of creating a few appropriate indexes, assuming the application isn't doing something stupid.
5. The tools to view and manipulate the data outside the application itself are already written and well-known. More to the point, you don't need to use the application itself in order to manipulate the data like you would if you were using some app-specific file format.
6. If you weren't stupid in how you wrote the application, you can change database engines without too much pain if that proves to be necessary/useful.

It doesn't take much to be better off sticking your data into a SQL database even if your data isn't relational in nature, as long as the data relationships you do have are relatively straightforward.

Re:I wonder

[robfoo]

I found out a potential reason behind the 'funny picture in word document' thing the other day. I sent my dad (who works at a govt dept) an email with a picture attached, and he replied with 'all pictures get stripped out of our emails. the workaround is to put the picture in a word document'
So I blame Corp/Govt email policies - pictures are obviously just (potentially offensive) time wasters, but Word documents are business, and we all know how quickly workarounds like that spread in corporate offices - much like using spreadsheets for data storage! Ha! I related it back to the topic! Wait.. what was the topic again?.. :)