Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 4th Jan 2010 22:41 UTC
A petition launched in December by MySQL creator Michael 'Monty' Widenius to 'save' the open-source database from Oracle has quickly gained momentum, collecting nearly 17,000 signatures. Widenius on Monday submitted an initial batch of 14,174 signatures to the European Commission, which is conducting an antitrust review of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, MySQL's current owner. The petition calls for authorities to block the merger unless Oracle agrees to one of three "solutions", including spinning off MySQL to a third party and releasing all past versions and subsequent editions for the next three years under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.
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RE[6]: waste of time and money
by google_ninja on Tue 5th Jan 2010 17:36
in reply to "RE[5]: waste of time and money"
Member since:2006-02-05
A lot of people say this, but I don't buy it. There isn't a major RDBMS out there that doesn't have proprietary extensions, simply because there are massive holes in the spec. For example, there are no stored procs in the spec, sprocs tend to be fairly critical, so as soon as you use one, you are locked in to that vendors implementation.
What is great about MySQL is how simple, fast, and reliable it is. The reason it is simple fast and reliable is because it doesn't do many of the things that other databases do. The reason it is so popular is because most people just need a place to persist data that can be backed up easily, and don't really care about ACID properties that are the real selling point of using an RDBMS in the first place.
RE[7]: waste of time and money
by computeruser on Tue 5th Jan 2010 17:56
in reply to "RE[6]: waste of time and money"
Member since:2009-07-21
There isn't a major RDBMS out there that doesn't have proprietary extensions, simply because there are massive holes in the spec.
And yet MySQL is one of the least standards compliant databases.
For example, there are no stored procs in the spec, sprocs tend to be fairly critical, so as soon as you use one, you are locked in to that vendors implementation
If stored procedures are so critical, how did MySQL become so popular when it didn't have them until version 5.0?
What is great about MySQL is how simple, fast, and reliable it is.
Simple: definitely not. There are way too many gotchas, and the various storage engines have their own.
Fast: with MyISAM, perhaps. But then you don't get transactions. Hardly simple.
Reliable: definitely not with the non-ACIDic MyISAM.
"simple, fast, and reliable" might be true for H2 (Java embedded database) or perhaps SQLite, for the small subset of typical RDBMS functionality it has.
RE[7]: waste of time and money
by Soulbender on Wed 6th Jan 2010 08:24
in reply to "RE[6]: waste of time and money"
Member since:2005-08-18
A lot of people say this, but I don't buy it
You should. There's a difference between having extensions and creating incompatibilities in the standard syntax.
The reason it is so popular is because most people just need a place to persist data that can be backed up easily, and don't really care about ACID properties that are the real selling point of using an RDBMS in the first place.
True that. For most applications mysql is just used a glorified flat-file storage.
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Member since:
2005-07-18
I disagree. *Many* of them are more, *most* of them are just a place to store, query, and backup data, for which an RDBMS of any kind is overkill. Hence the whole NoSQL movement. "
MySQL has historically deviated from the standards so much that it is really hard to move from it. Curiously, moving from SQLite to PostgreSQL or Oracle is easier than moving from MySQL to either one. I think MySQL made their deficiencies into 'feature', in classic Microsoft style, and got lots of clueless PHP (and Java) programmers locked in to MySQL.