MySQL Founder Monty Quits Sun (Or Not) 148
Paul Boutin writes "A reliable source tells Valleywag that MySQL inventor Michael Widenius, better known as Monty, has resigned from Sun. Sun bought Monty's MySQL company in a billion-dollar deal last January. Brian Aker, who forked the Web 2.0-friendly Drizzle SQL database (and former Slashdot engineer!), remains at Sun." Kaj Arnö and Sheeri Cabral share their thoughts.
Please use this thread to do the following: (Score:5, Funny)
1. Tell us how great your database is, (ie. postgres, mssql server, oracle etc..)
2. Tell us how shitty mysql is in your eyes.
3. Tell us how mysql "sold out"
So everything under this thread can be modded as "redundant"
Thank You.
Re:Please use this thread to do the following: (Score:5, Funny)
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Now now. PHP is a pain but a dang useful pain. Just like MySQL.
PHP and MySQL are both good but not great tools. What makes them useful is all the stuff that works with them.
I would drop MySQL in a second for Postgres except that too many CMS and other packages use it. The same is true of PHP.
There happy now?
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Okay Mr. Cranky Pants.
And javascript (Score:2)
And javascript. It's pretty flexible, but I think most people would prefer something saner, like smalltalk, java, c#, etc.
IF (Score:2)
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1. Tell us how great your database is, (ie. postgres, mssql server, oracle etc..)
2. Tell us how shitty mysql is in your eyes.
3. Tell us how mysql "sold out"
So everything under this thread can be modded as "redundant"
Thank You.
LOL! If I had mod-points, I'd be using them here! :)
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My database is great, mysql is shitty in my eyes, and mysql has sold out.
Is there a prize?
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Re:Please use this thread to do the following: (Score:5, Interesting)
Tell us how great your database is, (ie. postgres, mssql server, oracle etc..)
I'd rather tell why I think databases in general suck: Lack of standardization. It's one thing if you could do like with browsers and make compatibility chart with ANSI SQL, but it's choking full of proprietary extensions. Hopefully they'll sooner or later get around to supporting SQL:2003 which takes care of the worst ones. Here's one example, creating an unique ID:
The standard specifies a column attribute of: ... AS IDENTITY (non-core feature ID T174+T175).
GENERATED
PostgreSQL doesn't support the standard's IDENTITY attribute.
DB2: Follows standard, albeit with some restrictions on how identity columns may (not) be added to an existing table, etc.
MSSQL offers IDENTITY as a column property, but with a different syntax (not as intuitive and with less options) than the standard's specification.
MySQL doesn't support the standard's IDENTITY attribute.
Oracle doesn't support the standard's IDENTITY attribute.
And they bloody well all have a way of doing it, it's just five different ways. That's what I hate about databases, you don't pick one for RDBMS features but because you need to pick a language. It's like picking a computer because of the compiler. They seriously need to get the standards *ahead* of the implementations, like for example browsers and HTML/CSS standards. Or at least get a reasonable subset standard so you can write a non-trivial database neutral application.
Re:Please use this thread to do the following: (Score:4, Insightful)
Couldn't agree more. My other big pet peeve is applications that are database-specific (which obviously is related to the fact that app designers don't have much choice in the matter). I don't want to install my own MSSQL server for the sake of the one application that can't run on my company's enterprise scale server farm running some other RDBMS. I don't want to pick a different application that doesn't meet my user's needs simply because it handles the other RDBMS.
Oh, and if we actually had some standards perhaps there would also be a chance that every time Oracle releaes a new software releaes it wouldn't break half the applications I manage...
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Yup. Hence the reason I posted that in a discussion about the need to standardize SQL... :)
Use stored procedures? (Score:1)
Connection connection;
String sql = "{call whatIwannaDo (?) }";
Statement stmt = connection.prepareCall(sql);
stmt.setString(1,id);
Works whether its on MySQL, Oracle, or MSSQL , assuming you have the procedure in place on all three.
Granted, I agree that all servers support the standard. There are standard method workarounds in almost all languages to help make your app DB neutral.
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The only alternative I know of is building an API that transforms object-oriented queries into SQL. That's fine for simple queries, but when you need a complicated query things get ugly quickly.
All you really need is a good engineering team with disciplined code review. If you
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They seriously need to get the standards *ahead* of the implementations, like for example browsers and HTML/CSS standards
*cough*IE*cough*
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Well since the siblings seems to agree with you, I'm going to disagree.
Yes standards are nice, in theory you can pick any single database you want for your project.
However, in the real world different databases excel at different things. For instance SolidDB trades features for speed - no other database performs like their in memory option (while staying ACID); MySQL is great for being a dumb advanced storage engine for stuff you want to save, but aren't critical, they gain speed by relaxing the constraints
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But after you have finished the definition phase (programming) you can use the database in a quite standard way with SQL (executing).
Says someone that can barely have finished SQL for dummies. You can't even select the first ten rows in a standard way. FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY? ROW_NUMBER()? TOP 10? ROWNUM = 10? LIMIT 10? And if you're designing anything non-trivial you'll want things like triggers that can't be written in plain SQL (no, T-SQL, PL/SQL, pgSQL etc. are not plain SQL). Please tell me you don't design databases for anything. If you do please tell me which company, so I can stay the hell away from it.
Shoot (Score:5, Insightful)
If I'd just made a billion-dollar deal for my company, I'd sure look long and hard at not working anymore.
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Amen to that. MySQL has a huge user and developer community. After working that hard to get it to where it is from where it was, I'd seriously consider leaving it in someone else's capable hands and moving on to bigger and better things (like Fiji).
After that it's for fun (Score:2)
Some people keep working after their first billion. Like Bill Gates who kept running Microsoft for several years after he was a billionaire.
But guys like Bill certainly don't need to keep working, so I guess they enjoy steering a big company.
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If you'd just made a billion dollars, you would look long and hard to most women out there!... money... the best aphrodisiac! Just like The Professor [blowmeuptom.com] says. w00t! for 101 [tenetsofleykis.com]
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Does your crystal ball tell you that?
Re:Shoot (Score:5, Interesting)
No Crystal ball needed to see that Sun isn't long for this world.
Sun's market cap is down to $6.4 billion. Sun has over $2B in cash, $3B in receivables, and $1B in inventory and stock in other companies.
You could make a profit today (if you could buy the company for thet 6.4B, which you can't) by buying Sun, ceasing all sales and business activity beyond existing support contacts, and just gutting the company for the cash, real estate, etc.
If Sun falls much more, it *will* be profitable to buy and gut the company, as was done very frequently to companies in similar positions in the 80s. For any tech company that *wanted* Sun for some reason, it's nearly free to buy it today.
Heck, one of Suns few remaining large accounts might find it cheaper to buy Sun than to renew it's support contract!
I think the only reason why one of the big consulting companies (Accenture etc) hasn't bough Sun just for bragging right is that those are partnerships, and don't have the leverage.
IBM (Score:2)
I think it would make sense for IBM to buy Sun. IBM gets Sun's enterprise customers and they get full control of Java (which means that they can finally open source it for real). I suspect IBM is just waiting for Sun's stock to fall to the right level.
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Nah, twitter would have called them "$un".
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Especially when you sold it to Sun. There's a pretty good chance Sun will be bankrupt or bought up for a ridiculously low price within 5 years.
--
Any resemblance to fact is purely co-incidental. -- twitter
Am I the only one who finds this comment strangely in synch with the sig?
Re:Shoot (Score:5, Funny)
Posting at slashdot, Yoda is.
Basic astronomy ! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Basic astronomy ! (Score:4, Insightful)
But I understand where you're coming from.
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Actually, it's going to turn into a white dwarf in most likeliness. But I understand where you're coming from.
The cult of LHC doomsday prophets?
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In fact, with the exception of a few (H, and He most notably) the normal life cycle of the sun can create all of the elements up to and including iron!
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Aw man... I'm dreading the day that the sun expands and engulfs us.
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My personal favorite is when people learn of the whole magnetic fiel
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Previous flips of the magnetic field aren't correlated with mass extinctions. I find that quite surprising myseld, but it is at least somewhat reassuring.
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no golden handcuffs ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think he is going to fork the GPL version and start from there. That way he has the money and the control over MySQL.
Smart cookie, that Monty!
Re:no golden handcuffs ? (Score:5, Insightful)
They probably had a 9-month contract to keep him around and now the 9 months are up.
It is extremely common for the previous owner/ceo to bail out in a year or so after their company is acquired.
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Unless of course, you're a talentless, brainless, lying, two-faced, pony-tailed bastard with no future. Then you stay on until you get named CEO.
Oops, was that my outside voice again?
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There's always a time limit on those agreements. Presumably the time limit is up.
Please tell me... (Score:5, Funny)
...he's leaving to work on Python.
I mean, the PSF needs good, experienced developers, and, um, that's all.
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I mean, the PSF needs good, experienced developers, and, um, that's all.
So you'd inflict them with the guy who congealed MySQL, of all things? What'd they ever do to you?
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Yeah I got it, but... _Monty_ ? shouldn't that be __Monty__(self) ?
Is it still MySQL? (Score:5, Funny)
With the founder leaving, the name MySQL no longer fits.
Next slashdot poll...
MySQL's new name should be:
1. TheirSQL
2. SunSQL
3. JavaSQL
4. CowboynealSQL
I vote for #4.
Re:Is it still MySQL? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is it still MySQL? (Score:4, Interesting)
You forgot the version 9 at the end, even though there was no 6, 7, or 8.
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You forgot the version 9 at the end, even though there was no 6, 7, or 8.
Sun N1 iPlanet Java System ONE database Enterprise EditionOS 2.9?
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Monty on the Run (Score:4, Funny)
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Auf Wiedersehen Monty!
np: AFX - Reunion 2 (Chosen Lords)
Why is this a surprise? (Score:1)
Well, I would do the same (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well, I would do the same (Score:5, Funny)
Well no, the ultimate dream of every nerd is to have a threesome with Jessica Alba and Natalie Portman (petrified!) with hot grits down their pants, but I'm sure the retiring early thing is a close second.
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I think at this stage in her career (Score:2)
She doesn't get out of bed for less than $2 million.
That's fine if it's your bed, I guess...
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Well no, the ultimate dream of every nerd is to have a threesome with Jessica Alba and Natalie Portman (petrified!) with hot grits down their pants, but I'm sure the retiring early thing is a close second.
When you retire with a billion dollars you can most certainly fulfill the threesome dream.
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You mean besides hiring the guys who beat him up in high school to mow his 16-acre lawn?
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Actually, no, if I wanted to identify a nerd then one of the first question I'd ask them is, "If you built a company, would you want to be able to sell it to the big guys so you could go into early retirement?" If they say "yes", they're absolutely not nerds.
This annoys me because there are so many people who just want money and who pretend to be in with the whole nerd idealism thing, especially those in the Free software / OSS movement. They might be talented coders, but their care is to advance their name
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True nerds don't build billion-dollar companies.
True nerds learn embedded system languages so they can program their train set at home.
And sometimes, sometimes, help the rest of society with some of their pesky data problems.
As long as it doesn't cut into model train time much.
Substitute train set for 1/72 or 1/35 plastic-soldier painting and massive battles reenactments with a dog-eared battle rule book and battle tournament stats programs written in exotic languages.
Re:Well, I would do the same (Score:5, Informative)
Having slightly met Monty W, he is a true nerd. He didn't build a billion dollar company, he built a database that did what he thought databases should do. Many people do not exactly agree with him (see arguments on /. ad nauseam). But other people built a billion dollar company on that database. It deos not surprise me at all that he has taken his share of that billion dollars and walked off into the sunset. Maybe it is to Fiji, but even if it is, I would hazard a guess he will still be playing with databases on the beach.
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sounds like Woz to a tee.
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I'm not sure I agree with your version of idealism. Sure, idealistic people never want to retire.
The part I take exception to is that selling a business and moving on is somehow not idealistic. Selling out is not bad by itself, it's only bad if you hurt people in the process (e.g., if it's bought out just to destroy the company).
The usual case is that some idealistic person creates something, it makes people happy, they don't care enough about business details to stick around, so they sell it to work on som
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interesting timing (Score:5, Interesting)
Monty's been working on the interesting "Maria" transactional engine [mysql.com] (evolved from, and compatible with MyISAM), which is slated to become MySQL's future default engine.
Since they recently made a feature-complete ("no known bugs"!) release [blogspot.com] of Maria, I'm tempted to think that was his personal deadline to quit.
Josh Berkus [toolbox.com] (core PostgreSQL developer) also recently quit Sun. [toolbox.com]
I like Sun. I'm sad that they have lost these two brilliant database engineers, and I hope they go on and kick Oracle's (and that other company's) butt anyway.
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You can use "that other company's" name. I mean, we are talking about Microsoft here not Lord Voldemort, right?
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Actually, Maria isn't transactional. It was supposed to be, but it did't work out that way. Punting on transactions, they fell back to crash recoverable MyISAM. The next release is supposed to handle concurrent inserts. Other concurrent operations may follow someday. In the meantime, it doesn't support transaction backout, verb backout, two phase commit, transaction isolation, or any of the hard stuff.
MySQL went with InnoDB because MyISAM wasn't transactional. MySQL went with Falcon because Maria didn
Falcon architect Starkey also gone (Score:3, Interesting)
It's worth mentioning that Jim Starkey [wikipedia.org] (inventor of MVCC, etc) also quit recently. [firebirdnews.org] (He joined MySQL in 2006 [firebirdnews.org] to work on Falcon.)
So Sun has lost more database genius in 2008 than most companies ever had. :(
Re:Falcon architect Starkey also gone (Score:4, Informative)
quel faux pas (Score:2)
If I had eyes sharp enough I'd have noticed your initials on the post, instead of telling you something you already knew. Thanks for the clarification, and it's good to know that you're still involved in Falcon. :)
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Glad to see that (from the wikipedia link above) I'm not the oldest programmer reading slashdot, and very positive to know that the generation preceding me is still having an impact.
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but still involved with Falcon with both a consulting gig and a separate code collaboration agreement
We are currently using MySQL/InnoDB and are converting the code to move to PostgresSQL because our tests show it faster in our highly transactional environment. We'd love to stay with MySQL but Falcon is too far out and too uncertain about it's capabilities.
What are the expectations for Falcon in a non-Web transactional environment?
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I'll vote for the "doesn't think it is important" option. That was the one thing that always annoyed me about MySQL. Rather than apologize for taking a while to support transactions the party line seemed to be that MySQL was better because it could trash your data 10X faster than the competition.
Sure, I like having the option to speed things up by turning off transaction support. That is a wonderful feature to have. It is a horrible feature to require users to accept.
What I'm waiting for is transactiona
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Isn't Falcon was supposed to become the default engine?
FUD (no way) (Score:1)
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Did you refresh your cache?
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You told him to convert it to Java! Confess!
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Inventor? (Score:2, Interesting)
Since when does someone who codes up a partial SQL implementation get promoted to inventor status? It reminds me of a guy at work (one of those self-promoter types) telling me how he and his team "invented an XML".
Perhaps Linux inventor Linus Torvalds and Melissa inventor David Smith could chime in with their thoughts on this.
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How is Linus any more of an inventor? He coded an operating system. Just because it's more work doesn't make it more of an invention. The "inventor" title should be reserved for people who come up with novel solutions of a new category.
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How is Linus any more of an inventor? He coded an operating system. Just because it's more work doesn't make it more of an invention. The "inventor" title should be reserved for people who come up with novel solutions of a new category.
Actually, Linux coded an Operating System kernel.
Article Summary (Score:3, Funny)
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Safari can't find the server.
Safari can't open the page "http:///" because it can't find the server "".
What is your URL supposed to do on Chrome?
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He's running Chrome on a Sun box running Solaris! My, it's sure quiet, Larry.
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Yes, you have a point.
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In chrome the location ":%" apparently blows the thing up.
Has nothing to do with mysql, other then the fact that google is planning on putting a lite sql db into chrome to facilitate gears.
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That's already been fixed in the Chromium codebase [google.com], r1677, but the latest download seems to be r1583. If I were the Chrome team, I'd be in more of a hurry to get this particular fix out there.
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That's already been fixed in the Chromium codebase [google.com], r1677, but the latest download seems to be r1583. If I were the Chrome team, I'd be in more of a hurry to get this particular fix out there.
If you were the Chrome team, You'd be a lot of people!