Oracle can help Sun, but will it lose MySQL?
The Register paints a very unflattering picture of Sun Microsystems' alleged mismanagement of its hardware and software assets.
Unfortunately, there's likely a lot of truth to the argument, though it's easy to point fingers from the outside and tell others what to do.
But this is precisely why Sun should be grateful for Oracle's acquisition of its assets: Oracle needn't appease internal or customer lobbies. It just needs to determine what pays the bills, and shutter or sell everything that doesn't.
The one open question for me, however, remains MySQL. Oracle could do much with the technology, but I'm skeptical that it has much incentive in ensuring a long and prosperous future for MySQL.
Regardless, it may not get the chance. As reported by OStatic, MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius has suggested that MySQLers' life under Sun was rocky enough, but Oracle may convince them to bolt:
Sun's acquisition of MySQL did not go smoothly; most of the MySQL leaders (both commercial and project) have left Sun, and the people who are left are sitting with their CV and ready to press send. Oracle, not having the best possible reputation in the open-source space, will have a hard time keeping the remaining MySQL people in the company or even working on the MySQL project.
Given the fracturing we've already seen with MySQL, what with OurDelta, Drizzle, MariaDB, and other variants on the MySQL theme emerging in the past year, I suspect that we may be in for several more forks of the MySQL code base. There's simply too much at stake in the database layer of computing to allow MySQL to be submerged by Oracle's other database priorities.
So here's a thought: could Red Hat fork MySQL, hire some key developers, and effectively assume the mantle of MySQL leadership?
I doubt that it has that ambition, as it would end up hurting its still-strong partnership with Oracle. It is more likely that Red Hat would offer to buy MySQL, if it made a move for MySQL at all, and I doubt that the two could find a mutually agreeable valuation.
Regardless, unless Red Hat could replace MySQL's dependence on InnoDB, it would lack the means to truly create an independent fork of MySQL. By controlling InnoDB, the primary storage engine for MySQL, Oracle effectively controls MySQL, regardless of whether it owns the MySQL code.
I'd like to see MySQL in Red Hat's hands. But Red Hat hasn't shown much near-term desire to get far beyond Linux. We're going to have to wait to see Red Hat become the full-stack competitor to Microsoft that some of us would like to see.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Because of this I've started avoiding software that uses the free ver of MS SQL and will lean towards packages that use MYSQL. Looks like I may lose that option soon...
mySQL is open source and anyone can and has made copies of it and started new forks, this is not new, and not started with the Oracle purchase of Sun. Linux itself is in thousands of forks, but its still nevertheless has only a few well known distributions that have gained critical mass, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse, CentOS and a few others.....
You can make a compatible version, or fork an incompatible version...none of these things end the world.
They are not uninterested and not unaware of how opensource works. Whether they make every right decision or not, remains to be seen, but I would say mySQL has found a well funded, and expert database company as its 'home' or one of its many homes.
Also, with the amount of of performance and scalability patches sitting at the front door of the MySQL mainline, which MySQL couldn't integrate prior to sun anyway, there might be an argument the technology actually improves at ORCL. All those white space read intensive apps out there will continue to NOT go to ORCL 10g due to price/performance, so possibly there is an option to charge for "scalability/performance" features within mysql and finally allow the product do what it can do.
No. InnoDB is not the primary storage engine for MySQL. MySQL's primary storage engine was, is, and shall be in the future, is MyISAM.
No. Nearly no major MySQL applications use InnoDB. That includes Xoops, vtigerCRM and Dupro that you mentioned several times at many places. Even the MySQL DBMS itself does not use it. MySQL can leave the InnoDB behind. Oracle controls InnoDB, but that effectively does not matter.
You think that InnoDB is an business-quality database engine that enterprise MySQL all use it? The former is true, but the latter is not. MySQL simply does not care about that "business-quality", and so are the application developers of MySQL.
I still think that MySQL is a low-quality database management system, given that an compilation Unicode problem can delay for over 5 years, through Oracle, Sun and finally Oracle again. Low quality does not imply low popularity, and high popularity does not imply high quality, either.
Re. a Red Hat stack: Jim Whitehurst was pretty firm about not buying a database company when asked earlier this week.
http://www.cio.co.uk/opinion/veitch/2009/04/23/red-hat-ceo-no-plans-to-buy-database-firm/
<a href="http://www.pythian.com/news/2182/log-buffer-143-a-carnival-of-the-vanities-for-dbas">Log Buffer #143</a>
Since when do they get along so well? I seem to recall some bad vibes resulting from Oracle's Enterprise Linux RH clone.
- by johnjoda April 24, 2009 3:00 PM PDT
- How does this affect me today? The LAMP stack has its own inertia provided by its users. Doing something to upset this group would not help from a goodwill stand point.
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(15 Comments)Oracle seems brighter than the Sun they eclipse.