[rescue] Oracle kills Solaris

[Phil Stracchino]

On 09/06/17 13:41, Jonathan Patschke wrote:
> On Wed, 6 Sep 2017, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>> I actually disagree about that last part.  Oracle has worked *hard* on
>> MySQL, and has fixed performance and scalability problems and
>> storage-engine feature disparities that it has had for many years that
>> were just languishing under Monty Widenius.
> 
> I'd argue that those fixes are merely the natural fallout of developing
> the closed-source "enterprise edition," which allowed them to capitalize
> on the age of "LAMP" within the market segment of companies that like
> paying for useless support.

While it's true that a lot of Oracle's work has been into proprietary
extensions such as the Enterprise Query Analyzer, pretty much
*everything* they have fixed or enhanced in the core of mysqld itself
has gone straight into Community Edition.  They have actually made huge
improvements that just aren't immediately visible if you don't use MySQL
on a daily basis.  They've added features in MySQL that have made my
employer's senior Oracle DBAs ask plaintively, "Why don't we have that
in Oracle?"  (Preheating the InnoDB buffer pool on startup, for example.)

Buying an Enterprise MySQL license doesn't actually get you a different
MySQL engine, it just gets you support and the proprietary tools.  (And
in Oracle's [gasp] defense there, I have to say I've used the Enterprise
Monitor with Query Analyzer, and it's pretty damned shiny.)


> Otherwise, when compared to the strides that PostgreSQL made in the same
> period of time, one can only puzzle at how the _much_ more popular
> codebase advanced by so little.

At the risk of being somewhat catty, I /could/ suggest that PostgreSQL
had a lot more room for improvement to start with.  And they can't do
anything about some of the fundamental design decisions that make me
shake my head and wonder what the &#$(&$@%!$@! they were thinking.
PostgreSQL's origin as a conglomeration of separate CS students' senior
projects still shows badly.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino
  Babylon Communications
  phils at caerllewys.net
  phil at co.ordinate.org
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