Amazon's move mocks EU's fear of Oracle

The European Commission must be feeling a bit silly right about now. Despite insisting that Oracle has not responded to its requests for comment and concessions in its planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems (and the open-source database MySQL), Amazon.com recently offered the EC all the proof it needs that MySQL competition remains alive and well.

Competition at pennies an hour.

(Credit: Amazon)

For those who missed it, Amazon announced last week a fork of the popular MySQL database, called RDS (Relational Database Service). RDS is essentially a hosted version of MySQL, one that developers can write to at the minuscule cost of pennies per hour.

Oracle hasn't even started with MySQL yet, and it already faces significant competition, not to mention the other MySQL forks (e.g., Drizzle).

As Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady writes:

From here, it seems fairly clear that while RDS will not be the best option for every MySQL user, it will find a more than adequate market of customers who are willing to trade money for time, as (former MySQL CEO) Marten Mickos might put it. Assuming that Amazon can realize its typical economies of scale by amortizing the management and administration costs of the service over a wide array of machines, the product should more than pay for itself simply by widening the addressable market.

How much wider will it make the addressable market? At a minimum, it will lower the barriers to entry for customers with relational needs (read: most customers) and a lack of cloud expertise. It will be fascinating to see, however, if Amazon has far grander ambitions in mind.

Interesting, and somewhat unfair to Oracle. Presumably Amazon's entrance into the MySQL market is A-OK because Amazon isn't currently a database company, but it is a significant and growing infrastructure provider. Why should it get to own a complete stack, but Oracle can't?

That, after all, is what Oracle is attempting to accomplish with the Sun/MySQL acquisition. Sun gives it hardware, while MySQL gives it a strong entry into the Web database market and an effective hedge against Microsoft in lower-end enterprise needs.

Oracle's bid for Sun/MySQL, in other words, isn't about squelching competition, but rather about enhancing it. Amazon's RDS proves that strong, viable competitors to MySQL can arise from within the MySQL community, which disproves the EC's argument that Oracle's control of MySQL will somehow crush competition.

And if the deal doesn't hurt competition, as Amazon RDS all-but-proves it doesn't, then the EC's opposition is hollow and should be shelved, as The 451 Group's Matt Aslett argues.

It's time for the EC to acknowledge it was wrong, and move on. Amazon surely has. But until the EC makes a final decision, Oracle (and MySQL) can't.

[doubtthat]

Did Amazon create it's own DB engine to replace InnoDB? InnoDB is already owned by Oracle and is not open source. It is also the only DB engine for MySql that supports transactions, triggers, stored procedures, etc. If Amazon doesn't have a replacement for InnoDB then I wouldn't be interested in it.

[JoinFu]

Sorry, doubtthat, you are mistaken on a number of points:

"InnoDB is already owned by Oracle and is not open source."

Incorrect. InnoDB is released under the GPLv2.

"It is also the only DB engine for MySql that supports transactions, triggers, stored procedures, etc."

Again, incorrect. The PBXT and XtraDB engines, as well as a few others, support transactions. All storage engines support triggers and stored procedures as this functionality is "above" the storage engine layer.

Cheers,

Jay Pipes

[Please_Help_Us]

Matt, usually your posts make a lot of sense. This one doesn't. Are you certain it is Amazon's intention to "fork" the MySQL development tree and maintain their own independent codebase? My reading of the Amazon move (from the Amazon RDS FAQ page) is that they will simply be implementing MySQL 5.1 Community Edition. The benefit of the service comes not from the code side, but from more efficient administration of the server that MySQL is sitting on. There would not be a separate "fork" maintained by Amazon. Bottom line: even if it is impossible for Oracle to destroy MySQL (which I agree with), I think MySQL would be better off if was independent of Oracle. The Amazon move has nothing to do with this issue.

[odubtaig]

It is just a managed remote database hosting sevice:

""With Amazon RDS, you get full native access to a MySQL database," specifically, version 5.1 of the Sun Microsystems technology, the company said on its Amazon RDS site." says the article Matt himself has linked to.

Providing remote access, specifically to "version 5.1 of the Sun Microsystems technology" is not a fork by any stretch of the imagination; they're specifically selling at as unaltered MySQL.

While the EC has actually had its position as to the importance of MySQL strengthened Matt should be ashamed of himself for writing yet another load of obvious tripe. I want to know just how many shares he has in Sun.

[lukimiguel]

I think you're missing the whole point. What is to stop Oracle from squashing MySQL after the ECB approves the merger? Or what if their goal is to convert it from opensource to a paid model like their core? Oracle owning MySQL cannot be construed as 'enhancing competition' as you assert. Is it trust in Larry Elison that makes you believe that these aren't potential outcomes of the merger??