[geeks] And the other shoe drops - Oracle to buy Sun

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 21 Apr 2009, Mark Benson wrote:

> I've spent years building systems that all run off MySQL, if it goes to 
> the wall it'll mean porting to PostGres and learning the whole deal over 
> again.

I'd recommend that anyway.  I used both for years and finally switched to
fully Pg when MySQL changed the license on their documentation, and
haven't looked back since.  I don't see how I could, either; Pg is a
substantially more complete product.  Rather than concentrating on
eleventy different table backends, they actually had the audacity to
implement most SQL (transactions, cursors, stored procedures, referential
integrity, etc.), instead of leaving most of it dangling for years like
MySQL did.  As a result, while MySQL 5 has some of those same features
(albeit, not supported on all table types[0]), they're a lot more mature
in Pg.

Pg is difficult to admin, coming from a MySQL background, but once you
"get" it, it's difficult to look back on MySQL and figure how it ever made
sense.

> I won't be the only one either. Massive swaiths of the Internet are
> built on nothing more than Apache, PHP and MySQL.

Large pieces of the web, anyhow.

> Surely there's got to be some inertia in that which will lead Oracle to
> maintain it's community status? Well I guess it just depends how nice
> they are feeling, and theor CEO never struck me as a very 'nice' person.

There is nothing "nice" about Oracle.  However, we've seen how this turned
out with Berkeley DB.  Likely MySQL will be sliced into a multiple-tier
product, the bottom one being free.


[0] Where's my "abstraction violation" stamp?
-- 
Jonathan Patschke ( "They don't have the right to read a book out loud."
Elgin, TX         (                  --Paul Aiken
USA               (                    Executive Director, Authors Guild