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back to article Oracle will 'kill MySQL' and steal its users? Ha ha, haha, ha. Seriously, we won't – Oracle exec

If you think Oracle's only goal when it gained control of MySQL was to undermine it, Oracle has a message for you: Get over it. Speaking at the annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Monday, Oracle chief corporate architect Edward Screven said there was never any question of the database giant mothballing MySQL. " …

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  1. thames

    It's still Oracle

    People aren't so much concerned that Oracle would kill MySQL on purpose (at least not anymore). They're concerned that Oracle would kill it by smothering it with bureaucracy and by holding back features from the open source version to help sales of the proprietary version.

    Oracle saying that they don't see Oracle DB and MySQL as competing with each other is missing the point. They're looking for ways to segment the market in order to extract maximum value. Many customers however don't want to be "segmented" in this manner. They do not want to have to worry about what Oracle's sales and marketing department is going to dream up next.

    People are looking at Postgres as well as MariaDB. There's also the new and fancy no-sql databases, but Postgres is adding no-sql features and outperforming some of the no-sql database at their own game. There's a lot of new interest in Postgres as a result.

    16 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It's still Oracle

      My read is that it comes down to the balance struck between user (community) demands and monetization of the software. MySQL AB seemed to require only enough monies to support community driven development. The balance with Oracle has always been struck the other way with all products especially after acquisition. And no, I don't believe this is necessarily a bad thing, indeed a positive given how many, with much grumbling, pay for their products. There are alternatives, aren't there? Quite a few actually as the database systems I've worked go back to the fifties. (The only reason I became literate in COBOL.)

      It is refreshing that non-SQL has returned to the toolbar. And that a SQL-first player like Oracle is paying attention.

      0 1 Reply
    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: It's still Oracle

      What's wrong with Oracle want to segment and make money? Lots of companies are happy to pay for support.

      I much prefer Postgres over MySQL but that doesn't mean I don't want to see improvements in both. I'm very pleased that companies are also seriously evaluating Postgres / Enterprise DB as a possible replacement for Oracle. This should hopefully prompt Oracle to improve their product offerings.

      MariaDB on the other hand looks like the continuation of the fast, poor quality bits of MySQL. But there are obviously people who want just that.

      1 3 Reply
      1. Database Guy
        Reply Icon

        Re: It's still Oracle

        "MariaDB on the other hand looks like the continuation of the fast, poor quality bits of MySQL. But there are obviously people who want just that."

        I'm not sure what bits you are talking about? MariaDB has released many new features that the MySQL community (both free and enterprise) have been wanting for a long time.

        0 0 Reply
    3. N13L5
      Reply Icon

      Re: It's still Oracle

      What worries people more than any specific theory is the corporate credo:

      "Its not enough that we win, we want the other guy to loose"

      0 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Head Count

    "Oracle has doubled the size of the MySQL engineering and support teams over the last five years, he said, and tripled the size of the QA team."

    Considering most of the core development team left (and joined MariaDB project) after Oracle took over, doubling or tripling the head count doesn't actually mean that it is back where it was before Oracle. Most Linux distributions have switched to MariaDB, which is telling.

    7 0 Reply
  3. Paul Johnston

    Oracle MySQL

    Oracles problem regarding MySQL is basically a lot of people don't like them.

    For a anti-Oracle rant see below:

    http://smartos.org/2011/12/15/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-development-of-illumos-2/

    There are several options you can use to replace Oracles version of MySQL and I don't think any technical arguments are going to overrule some who just hates Oracle and say's lets use MariaDB/ Postgres whatever.

    0 0 Reply
    1. JEDIDIAH
      Reply Icon
      Linux

      Re: Oracle MySQL

      MySQL isn't a product. It's a community project. A community requires trust. No amount of slick sales tactics can take the place of trust and respect. Oracle are simply the wrong people to steward something like this. They simply don't get it. They are wrongful on a fundemental level.

      0 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oracle are poison

    and they ruin everything they touch.

    4 2 Reply
  5. Stretch

    "This was a very mysterious concept to us."

    You have a self-awareness problem then. Coz we could all see what you were going to do. And you did. Hence all the forks.

    5 0 Reply
  6. Charlie Clark Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    "Frankly, when MySQL came into Oracle, MySQL was a bit of a mess,"

    Absolutely. It's still got some stupid bugs but has a got a lot better since it's been at Oracle.

    1 3 Reply
  7. Tim Brown 1

    Meaningless statistics

    "the open source database can now process 645,000 SQL queries per second and more than 1 million NoSQL queries per second. It can also handle 67,000 connections per second"

    Those numbers are meaningless unless you say what hardware is being used, and even then they are still meaningless as numerous other factors such as table sizes and query complexity have to be taken into account.

    5 0 Reply
    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Meaningless statistics

      MySQL is only fast for queries that don't involve JOINs. The optimiser seems to have a love-hate relationship with foreign keys.

      1 0 Reply
      1. Daniel B.
        Reply Icon

        Re: Meaningless statistics

        MySQL is only fast for queries that don't involve JOINs. The optimiser seems to have a love-hate relationship with foreign keys.

        Monty hates transactions and FKs. That's why the initial releases of MySQL supported neither, and were only added first by hacking BDB as a new engine type for MySQL, and later via InnoDB. But the anti-transaction stuff is part of the basic MySQL stack, and it shows because anything transactional is always pushed into the InnoDB engine.

        So it isn't really surprising that those features are lacking in MySQL...

        0 0 Reply
  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    FYI

    Ever wondered why its called MySQL?

    Monty's first daughter is called My. Luckily he had another, called Maria. Handy when you've got a DBMS to name.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: FYI

      And My is a character in the Moomin books. As Wikipedia summarises her character, "She is a small, determined and fiercely independent Mymble". So ownership by Oracle is about as utterly inappropriate as you can get.

      0 0 Reply

  9. This post has been deleted by its author

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oracle? MySQL?

    Suckers buy Oracle's lies, and buy BIG .... sorry bottom line. MySQL placates the lazy; both dinosaurs moments before the asteroid. The real heavy lifting products are neither of these.

    0 0 Reply
  11. pyite

    Thank you GPL

    It is impossible to kill a GPL project that has sufficient momentum. Worst case there will be too many forks to manage.

    3 1 Reply
    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Thank you GPL

      It's impossible to kill any open source project. The GPL is just food for lawyers.

      0 0 Reply
  12. John Savard

    They're Smart Enough

    to know that if they killed MySQL, most of its users would just go over to Postgres. Or to a fork of MySQL, which, after all, is (or was in earlier versions) GPL licensed (or something similar; I vaguely recall the Apache license as a possibility) open source.

    Instead, though, that they might direct the development of MySQL in such a way as to have it entice users to consider migrating to Oracle, is to be expected.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Mick Russom
      Reply Icon

      Re: They're Smart Enough

      They are already gone. Maria, EDB and postgres. Nobody starts with oracle-mysql anymore.

      1 1 Reply
  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oracle learned their lesson.

    Janet P tried to do it with Informix.

    Informix customers passed on DB2, and went to Oracle instead.

    Posted anon because I was there and escaped from the Borg to live and tell about it...

    1 0 Reply
  14. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    It's not so much what Oracle intends to do with MySQL...

    As what they will inevitably do with it simply by being Oracle.

    But then MySQL had already poisoned the well with their FUD tactics to try and sell unwanted and unnecessary licenses, long before even Sun stepped in to the frame, never mind Oracle.

    2 0 Reply
  15. Mick Russom
    FAIL

    Oracle is only alive due to entrenchment and government contracts.

    Oracle is finished. We ALL know in MIS/IT/devops/etc that Oracle is the enemy. We have ALL be moving to enterprisedb, postgres and maria for some time now. Solaris is more or less dead to new projects. Nobody would willingly make a new deployment a Oracle "red-stack" on purpose.

    Too bad, Sun was awesome, but anything that was Sun's is now radioactive.

    1 1 Reply

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