MySQL Founders Reunite To Form SkySQL 215
mikejuk writes "The founders of the original MySQL, the open-source database, are getting back together in a merger between Monty Program and SkySQL. SkySQL was created by around two dozen former MySQL executives and investors after Oracle bought MySQL from Sun. Widenius started Monty Program AB and created the MariaDB database from some of MySQL's open source code. The merger will provide a stronger rival to MySQL, so reassuring users who are worried about Oracle's future plans for the database."
What a relief (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What a relief (Score:5, Interesting)
Stay away (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the people who came up with MySQL shouldn't be touching PostgreSQL code.
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Yes, ... it'll outclass MySQL in no time ... or rather, negative time, since it has been clearly superior to MySQL for years in every way. The only thing that keeps MySQL popular is people who don't know what they are doing, which it does fine for.
Re:What a relief (Score:4, Insightful)
A number of developers familiar with MySQL fire up PostgreSQL or MS SQL Server or Oracle, try it out for awhile, find that they get a ton of errors that they don't understand because MySQL let them get away with egregious idiocy, and then retreat back to MySQL.
Source: used to be me.
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I believe BitZtream was referring to MariaDB, not Postgres. MariaDB is a pretty seamless upgrade from MySQL, since it's a fork.
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Well, you're half right....it isn't 2001.
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I'm just hoping they'll try to make a database this time...
Which will power SkyNet (Score:3, Funny)
...Hasta la vista, Baby!
SQL Query (Score:5, Funny)
SELECT Name, Date, Time, Lat, Long, Photo FROM humans WHERE Name = "Sarah Connor"
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and world is saved because the data entry person misspelled it "Conor". A toast to human error!
Exciting development for MariaDB (Score:5, Informative)
If I understand the release correctly, this will mean that MariaDB will continue with organizational support from SkySQL. Sounds like they are well on the road to being the top MySQL "distribution" which is good reassurance for making the switch.
Re:Exciting development for MariaDB (Score:5, Insightful)
I was already tempted. Now I'm pretty much convinced.
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Maybe, maybe not.
I hope you are right but this is Oracle they are dealing with.
Now that Widenius has some "Executives and Investors" supporting him, he becomes a target for Oracle lawyers.
Even without a valid claim, they could tie him up in court for years and years.
Also remember that Executives and Investors want a ROI, and its hard to do that with an open source project like MariaDB.
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Also remember that Executives and Investors want a ROI, and its hard to do that with an open source project like MariaDB.
Erm, you're talking about the people who sold the open source MySQL to Sun for $1BN... They know there's money in open source databases....
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Who were they planning on selling it to next, and why should that make me feel all warm and fuzzy about using My/Sky/MariaDB?
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I want to like it, but if they ever want any real fandom they need to pick a name and stick to it for more than 15 minutes.
I loved My - S - Q - L and I want to love whatever the hell you call it too!
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Who were they planning on selling it to next, and why should that make me feel all warm and fuzzy about using My/Sky/MariaDB?
what does it matter? anyhow, they're probably getting revenue stream from selling support for it.
IF they find someone stupid enough to dump millions on them for the _name_ then why not? good luck for finding a sucker like oracle again.
that would enable them to do r&d and development on it for a while without worrying about ongoing support contracts.
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Erm, you're talking about the people who sold the open source MySQL to Sun for $1BN... They know there's money in open source databases....
The face that they sold it then turned around and started a direct competitor using its own source code could potentially land them in hot water.
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That is the beauty of open source - you can do that.
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The real shocker is that Monty tried to get the Sun-Oracle merger court to remove the GPL from MySQL, and allow companies to take the code private, so he could basically pick up where MySQL AB left off before he sold it to Sun in the first place.
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Heh, beauty.
What you call beauty, the rest of the world refers to as a worthless side project, and hence why Oracle dropped work on it.
You guys think this is a good thing, you're too stupid to realize this is just another example of why a business wants nothing to do with GPL'd software. They can dump a metric fuckton of money into it and then watch the prick who made it walk out the door and take it to someone else and do the same thing.
You have to be stupid to invest in GPL software.
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Because Sun never (that we now of) requested a legal binding of no competition for their purchase of MySQL AB. Sun wasn't bad, ethically, maybe one of the reasons they went under. Oracle on the other hand just got what they got from Sun
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You're a moron if you think MySQL was the reason Oracle bought Sun.
Oracle could give a fuck if MySQL exists, you're sadly uninformed if you think MySQL competes with Oracle in anyway. They are not just in different classes, they're at almost complete opposite ends of the spectrum.
Oracle bought Sun for Java and high end servers. This is clear based on their strategy of you know ... using those things they bought and not discarding them like the crap that Sun had that they see no future in, such as Whatever
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Probably wasn't "the" reason, but was one of the strong ones. Java and Solaris should be the other components, with Solaris maybe being the most strategical ones.
And yes, MySQL competes against Oracle in what matter most to the company: support contracts. There is a bunch of databases with better features than MySQL, but it have by the market (or at least, as most aren't sales, the users, or the amount of installations).
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"Now that Widenius has some "Executives and Investors" supporting him, he becomes a target for Oracle lawyers."
I don't see why. Open Source projects (and MariaDB is pretty solidly Free & Open Source... I doubt they'd have even the slightest trouble proving that) have long enjoyed corporate support. I don't see that it changes anything.
But.. (Score:2)
But Monty doesn't have a daughter named Sky?!
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Shhh! -- don't tell his wife! :-)
The crying game (Score:5, Informative)
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Most shared hosts provide MySQL, so a lot of web software is coded with MySQL in mind first.
Re:The crying game (Score:5, Funny)
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Thats because you're using your MySQL server in a shitty way and arent' aware of the various reasons its shitty.
Work on clustering ... seriously?
PostgreSQL has mutli-master clustering built in. A quick check shows that MySQL still has nothing built in for that purpose.
MySQL fails spectacularly if you use it incorrectly, just like PostgreSQL.
Your entire post just illustrates your ignorance of both MySQL and other offerings.
Re:The crying game (Score:5, Informative)
For a billion dollars even a true believer would sell. You could take a fraction of that billion and make another DB and still have enough money to jerk off with thousand dollar bills for the rest of your life.
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Re:He sold to Sun, not Oracle (Score:2, Insightful)
MySQL was sold to *Sun*, who were good stewards of the code and community. Then Sun was taken over by Oracle.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
What a relief (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's all back these guys so that they can sell us out a second time later down the road, when the community makes them successful again.
Re:What a relief (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, their work allows you to become successful, FOR FREE... so you know, they're definitely screwing you.
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Explain, please? (Score:2, Funny)
I was just coming around to the idea I might explore MariaDB next time I needed to do something, where normally I've been turning to MySQL. Is SkySQL replacing that, now?
Also, do any of the large, inexpensive web hosts (hostgator, dreamhost, servint, etc.) provide either of these alternatives yet? Because frankly I'm not going to do a lot of personal configuration or pay a lot extra just for the novelty.
Re:Explain, please? (Score:4, Informative)
SkySQL is a commercial entity that uses MySQL and now MariahDB - http://www.skysql.com/ [skysql.com]
They are replacing MySQL with MariahDB for their hosted solutions and throwing financial backing at the project. MariahDB is not going away. I would encourage you to look into PostgreSQL however as an alternative: http://www.postgresql.org/ [postgresql.org]
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I've heard good things about Posgres from people who should know what they're talking about, but I haven't had anything important or demanding enough to go out of my way to explore it yet. Next time I've got something with any actual business use, I'll probably take a closer look at it. Database stuff isn't part of the day job, so it doesn't come up a lot.
Model for the new FLOSS business model (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Create a popular but flawed FLOSS product (MySQL).
2. Build a business atop flawed FLOSS product (MySQL AB).
3. Ca$h out by selling your baby to formerly glorious tech company on the ropes (FGTCOTR, aka SUN).
4. Profit!
5. Leave FGTCOTR after a tasteful waiting period to start your own company DOING THE SAME THING YOU JUST SOLD because you can fork the OSS codebase you just sold.
6. Take public potshots at EVIL Corp (who very predictably acquired FGTCOTR) for mismanaging the baby you sold (because EVIL), while flogging your fork of the product you sold as a viable alternative (FLOSS, to cloak yourself in the veneer of legitimacy because you can live off of steps 3 and 4).
7. Reunite to form company that does the same thing the company you sold for big $$$ did, to compete with the product you willingly relinquished control over.
8. GOTO #1?
I can't decide whether to admire Monty for successfully gaming the system, or condemn him as an amoral manipulator who wasted no time screwing over the very people he sold out to at the earliest possible opportunity.
Grudgingly, I lean toward admiration. Nicely done, sir.
That said, I avoid MySQL as the half-baked relational DB pretender that it is and use PostgreSQL whenever possible. Better technology without the drama. I have never regretted PgSQL once, MySQL many times.
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He's a douche on many levels, but he deserves no credit for this.
Sun was retarded to buy MySQL in the first place. It was just a fucking stupid thing to do, especially for a billion fucking dollars. They could have had it for free ... instead they gave this douche a billion and HE gets it for free.
Oracle then proceeded to buy Sun for Java and server hardware. MySQL was never something they cared about. They'll probably be happy if he'd just take it and shut the fuck up. MySQL doesnt' compete in any way
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I'll agree with you except for the part where they'd be happy if he just took it and STFU. I think Oracle knew exactly what they were doing when they bought Sun, and they cared quite a lot about MySQL. I think Oracle was happy to try and exploit MySQL's popularity as a "gateway drug" - they would be poised and waiting with salespeople to offer a "real database" when folks who built a business on LAMP outgrew it and were looking for something better. To support this opinion, I'll remind you that Oracle bo
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Number 8 will not be possible, because they only have the GPL code, they can't dual license it, unless they replace all code or write a new one from scratch
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Damn. Forgot about that. You are absolutely right. Wish I could edit posts.
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You're splitting hairs. Companies are run by people. They have or lack the morals the people who run them have.
Also, Monty announced leaving Sun in Feb 2009 to create his own company. The Oracle merger was completed in Jan 2010. So he conceived of and created his own company to compete with the one he sold to well before Oracle owned MySQL.
I'm sick of the whining. Software development = $ (Score:2)
This smells like the Jenkins/Hudson gayness... All these projects are forking because of big bad Oracle, before Oracle has even done anything. Good god, the open source community is LUCKY to have a corporation that is willing to sink dollars into an open source project. If that means giving up
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bad ... good ... pleased ... smells like ... gayness... because ... bad ... Good ... LUCKY ... willing ... means ... little ... cool ... try ... bullshit ... can ... whining ... cry ... community ... really ... need ... brilliant ... circle jerk ... offer ... rainbows ... unicorns ... best ... community?
Well, that's like, your opinion, man.
Re:I'm sick of the whining. Software development = (Score:5, Interesting)
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You have no idea what the term scorched earth means. It in no way applies to what they've done. Stop using words you don't understand just because you heard someone else say it and it sound scary evil to you.
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Okay, we'll rework it, but will "asshat" be okay with you?
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Soap Opera. (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems the only way for us to circumvent all this BS is not to use anything affiliated with Oracle, MySQL, or its creators.
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I wouldn't go that far, but at the very least look into PostgreSQL and see what it can do -- I mean, doesn't look like it's going to be upended anytime soon.
Also, this whole mess is what happens when folks settle for non-free binary blobs in their otherwise free & open source software.
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This soap opera is getting way too confusing.
What else would you expect from a bunch of DBA's?
MyriaskySql? (Score:2)
Why does it sound like a Russian word for "diarrhea" when the 3 merge? It would just invite too many "In Soviet Russia" jokes.
BUT, we need a whackjob name to compete with "Postgresql". In the FOSS world, sounding squishy, green, and crippled is "street cred" (gimp, grep, gnu, lisp, etc.)
We're putting the band back together. (Score:2)
We're on a mission from God.
Using SkySQL/MariaDB is for sellouts (Score:2)
Thats what they did isn't it? They sold out, then took their toys and left, and are going to do it again.
Congratulations, you have illustrated to every business in the world who's paying attention why it would be absolutely fucking stupid to invest any money in a GPL project. Your greed has effectively manipulated the concept of FOSS into something more evil than even what Oracle does.
Oracle is up front about stabbing you in the back. They'll tell you they are going to do it. This prick is just a two fa
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they didn't show that it would be stupid to invest money in a gpl product.
they just showed that it's a stupid idea to buy a gpl product. investing into it before that was very, very smart from financial point, because someone was stupid enough to buy it for an ungodly amount of money, and for support contract etc. reasons it was probably smart to invest in it even if there hadn't been a sellout - and I don't think he ever made a statement saying otherwise, that he wouldn't ever compete with it after selling
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The majority of the internet would disagree with you. I'm not a big DB person but I do use MySQL on my hosted website. I'd happily go to Postgresql if my provider offered it though.
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The majority of the internet would disagree with you. I'm not a big DB person but I do use MySQL on my hosted website. I'd happily go to Postgresql if my provider offered it though.
So many people (99%-ish?) use MySQL as a multi-user sqlite, to organize a few thousand rows for personal sites. And that's great, Mysql is well understood and lived long enough as a fully open source project to be a good choice. But people who use databases for *serious* work (not to devalue anyone's blog, but serious here means many tables of 1M+ rows) there is a vacuum in the open source space since the innovation that used to happen at MySQL is now kept private.
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Understood, but as far as I am aware, MySQL never pretended to be that. I've been aware of MySQL for over a decade and used it off and on. I'm not a DB admin so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. But MySQL was always the "Use it for your website!" DB package. Facebook seems to get a lot of use from it, granted they use a patched version.
Postgresql was supposed to be the heavy lifter if I remember right. Is this not the case?
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But MySQL was always the "Use it for your website!" DB package.
Hell, it's one quarter of the popular LAMP combo.
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If you could get rid of MySQL and PHP, LAMP would be nearly as disappointing.
Seriously if PHP and MySQL are your flagship products you don't have any clue how disappointing your offering is. If you did, you wouldln't be bragging about them.
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Re:Stronger rival? (Score:4, Informative)
Understood, but as far as I am aware, MySQL never pretended to be that.
Monty has long made excuses for MySQL's inadequacies (most notably the pre-INNODB argument that foreign key constraints weren't really that important and you could just enforce such constraints in software). So there *were* attempts to pretend that MySQL was a "serious" database equivalent to better alternatives. Many of the shortcuts MySQL uses (or used - some of this is historical) apply to edge cases that aren't apparent to "I'm not a DBA" developers creating simple LAMP applications. But when you *do* run into one of those edge cases, then you quickly feel the pain and realize that it could have all been avoided.
Here's a good read: http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else [grimoire.ca]
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Thanks for the link
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My pleasure.
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Facebook at 13M queries per second would like to say "hi".
Facebook gets that throughput from the sharding system that they wrote - the individual MySQL databases aren't doing anything particularly impressive.
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I don't think that's quite true - Hadoop works just fine for the analysis backend at Facebook, which stays just as busy. The problem lies with legacy systems written for a RDBMS that could just as easily have been written for a NoSQL DB. If you were starting from scratch today, NoSQL makes a whole lot of sense and scales out-of-the-box quite well - but that's useless to the existing code base.
All of the major cloud providers have their own version of scale-by-sharding systems for RDBMS, but they're mostly
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There are multiple that will do that very thing and in fact have been.
Facebook is a popular website. Thats where it ends.
There are multiple out of the box solutions that will in fact work as well as MySQL did 'out of the box' Since they are in no way using Out of the Box MySQL your entire statement is retarded and pointless. You're trying to compare a custom version of some software to an off the shelf generic version and pretend its a fair comparison.
Its not.
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Memcached would like to tell you that MySQL isn't doing shit you think it is doing. Memcached also says 'please to be getting a clue'
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But it's high speed!
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Its not. Wikipedia's database load is rather low. Serving mostly static content from memcached can be done with any number of databases just as easily.
Its cute how you guys point out websites with a lot of traffic as if they indicate database load in some direct way.
Why VISA starts using MySQL for transactions, then you can start talking about it being serious.
SQLite (Score:3)
The majority of the internet would disagree with you.
The majority of Internet users use web applications as a user, not as a server administrator, and definitely not as a developer.
I'd happily go to Postgresql if my provider offered it though.
Have you considered SQLite? Some MySQL haters would claim that some of SQLite's features are better even if the concurrency is worse, and if your site is on a plan smaller than a VPS, it probably isn't popular enough to need heavy concurrency yet.
Re:Stronger rival? (Score:5, Insightful)
MySQL is demonstrably scaleable and is secure and robust enough for the vast majority of applications. It is used extensively in health care - which has fairly high privacy and data retention requirements. It's a matter of using the right tool for the right application. Sledge hammers are useful for breaking concrete, not so much for framing. Statements like "because banks don't use MySQL, you shouldn't either" are just ignorant.
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I've heard this a lot - this idea that PostgreSQL has better transactional integrity than MySQL, but most applications don't need it, and so they are fine using MySQL instead.
That's a good reason to not rule out MySQL, but it's not a reason to choose MySQL over PostgreSQL. What exactly are the reasons for choosing
MySQL/MariaDB/SkySQL over PostgreSQL? I don't know enough about databases to answer this myself, but every time I read about this question, all I hear is "most people don't need PostgreSQL so there
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To be fair, I think if Facebook were starting over today with a clean codebase, and know they were going to grow into such a massive enterprise, they might have made different design choices. As it is, they are committed to MySQL and have tuned, optimized and tweaked the hell out of it to suite their requirements.
I believe a Facebook engineer once stated exactly what you suggest. I'm sure they would have gone another direction but just the fact that Facebook is able to use it like it does seems to imply it's a pretty capable open source project, despite its flaws.
In reality, MySQL is sort of a poster child for open source software. It's a case where a company started using it to keep expenses down. Out grew it but because they had the source they were able to modify it for their use and contributed it back to the co
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Think of using a relation database like a NoSQL DB.
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MySQL is only good enough to keep unimportant information.
Did you not see this line?
Facebook IS loosing quite a bit of money.
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Facebook has been profitable since 2009 [techcrunch.com].
That depends on what kind of user base you want (Score:3)
There are several good open source/free to use database engines. MySQL is not one of them.
That depends on what kind of user base you want. If you develop a web application for installation on hobbyist web sites, something comparable to WordPress or phpBB or MediaWiki, you need to make it compatible with MySQL because so many budget web hosts provide only MySQL (and possibly SQLite).
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Then you've not shopped around as there are plenty of budget providers that offer PostgreSQL. I buy and sell vintage & antique furniture from estate sales on the side. Last year I took a break from IT projects, but I did write a simple mobile web app to display my stuff online using jQuery Mobile, Perl, and PostgreSQL using A2Hosting as my provider for like $6 a month.
This year I'm working on IT projects again. This one just so happens to be based around Wordpress for many reasons. In Q3 this year I
Re:Stronger rival? (Score:4, Funny)
There are several good open source/free to use database engines. MySQL is not one of them.
On the other hand, it's the only concurrent DB I would consider to be a perfect match for PHP. ;)
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Yes, we know PHP is crap too.
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Whilst I agree with you (having sweated blood over fixing corrupted MySQL tables more times than I'd care to mention), and wish there was more support for more robust databases, it seems most of the world hasn't caught up with this idea yet.
Not only do most webhosts only support/provide MySQL (IIRC due to Postgres and others not having quota support), but there's a vast swathe of projects out there that don't have support for anything other than MySQL. Heck, I was looking into upgrading my home install of G
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With any decent database you can write ANSI SQL for 99% of the work and never have to touch it again (unless you are going to use a POS like MySQL later).
There is a world of difference between the changes needed to go from SQL server to Oracle (as you say, stored procedures and other supersets of the ANSI spec) vs going to/from an incompetent implementation like MySQL.
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However, given that at least three ****wits have already modded you "informative" for this post, I feel obliged to point out that the original comment is more than likely a Joe job [wikipedia.org] (as well as a troll), and pretty obvious one.
Matter of fact, I wouldn't discount the possibility that "your" comment was made by the same person as the original, but the fact it was modded up sh
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He's been posting these emails in almost every thread for the last few days. He's the "my fast pc" spammer for some unknown Linux website. If you check his Contact page [linuxadvocates.com] you'll see I am not him as he doesn't like his email address displayed in a scrape-able way
Are you really that dim? I already linked "joe job" and you still managed to miss the entire point.
Let me explain it in *very* *simple* *words*. The person that posted the original "spam" above is probably *not* "Dieter T. Schmitz" as they claim, but someone else who is (a) trying to make him look bad (b) trolling, and/or (c) stirring up trouble by pretending to post spam under his identity.
Your logic is circular- you're already assuming that "he" posted the original comment, when in fact "he" probably
Wrong Conclusion (Score:2)
Ulf Michael "Monty" Widenius, is the main author of the original version of the open-source MySQL database and a founding member of the MySQL AB company.
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So?
I've worked at many companies. Rarely are the founders the ones who make the product great. People like Linus are a rare exception, not the norm. Expecting him to recreate his previous impressions is unrealistic at best.