Drizzle Hits General Availability 146
snydeq writes "MySQL fork Drizzle has been released for general availability, giving companies a viable alternative to Oracle-owned MySQL, InfoWorld reports. 'Organizations that have been seeking a less-expensive alternative to Oracle's brand of MySQL — or a variant devoid of feature bloat — now have an option that Drizzle's creators deem ready to package in Linux distributions.'"
Re:MySQL went wrong direction long time ago (Score:4, Interesting)
Just out of interest - i've always wondered why Postgres seems to trail in popularity to MySQL. I know the limitations of the latter having used it far too much, does anybody know where Postgres trails MySQL?
In my experience (since the last quarter of the 1990s), PostgreSQL never really trailed MySQL because there was anything wrong with it, it just fell in an awkward spot along the database spectrum. On one end of the spectrum (well, Berkeley DB was at the extreme end, just above flat files, but MySQL was next in line) MySQL fit the needs of the majority of data-driven webapps at the time.
A lot of web developers didn't need a proper database and often didn't recognize when they did need one, and couldn't design a decent schema in any case. MySQL was a good match for this skillset - it was easy for someone to set up and instance, throw together some tables and start coding. Any deficiencies were often just handled by throwing the logic into the code. MySQL was also pretty darned fast, which was important due to the hardware limitations of the time, and it could scale well enough for most needs. That got it a toehold and mindshare. Over the years as the demands of the web grew, Monty and friends made sure it stayed in that sweet spot. On the other end of the spectrum, if you *really* needed a proper database or massive scalability, you were usually doing something enterprise-ish, and that usually meant there was enough money available to pay for Oracle (or MS-SQL) and a Solaris machine. You had DBAs trained to manage the beast and design proper databases. Somewhere in between was PostgreSQL. Not as fast as MySQL (being ACID compliant was harder work), more difficult to setup, more demanding of hardware, not quite as powerful as Oracle, few people were trained to use it. Being free (of charge) didn't matter, because there was generally more to lose if things went wrong than the cost of the database, so Oracle was a safer bet. So, though it was more than good enough, PostgreSQL just didn't end up being as popular as MySQL. Didn't really matter, IMHO, because PostgreSQL did just fine and found a niche of it's own where it is doing quite well. Popularity isn't everything.