Posts by DSOSunSoftware

Wow Has This Thread Gotten Out of Control

As a Sun employee watching the company I have put a lot of my soul into for the last decade being dismantled by a Euro-crat, I now understand better the mindset of the "new" EU. What has the merger of a software/hardware/storage company got to do with Guantanamo Bay, nukes, crashing Airbuses, and cuddly Shi'ites?

Lets be perfectly clear who is the Super power and who is Empiric relic. For the better part of the last two millenium, European Imperialists have trounced the world, raping and pillaging for personal profit. My country is a bastard offshoot of that practice.

In the last 100 years, we have had to twice land our troops on European soil to clean up European messes. Not the other way around, mate. We battled on European ground and still invest heavily on keeping stability of the EU region. You would all be speaking German or Russian by now if it wasn't for the US imposing its will on European matters. Now, we can not even rely on European assistance against a group of terrorists who think it is religious nirvana to blow themselves up and kill as many innocent people as possible. Oh yeah, giving these guys an atomic bomb would be a great idea. Look what they did with commercial jets.

The US is the last Super Power left and tough if that makes you whine (as usual). We earned it the hard way and we are not about cede that advantage to anyone. We got the subs, jets, drones, tanks, and troops with the backbone to stand up when needed. We are also the driving force force for innovation and technology for the world. And the world financial crisis is a world problem, not just a US one. The fact US banks caused the whole thing to collapse shows just who is reliant on whom. And we in the US are getting tired of the rest of the world blaming us for all of their problems. We don't get it right all the time, but our record is better than anyone's from Europe.

There used to be an old electronic bulletin board rule that said a thread was allow to run until someone called someone else a Nazi or Hitler. Well, Rex has reached that low, so I officially call this thread over. Auf wiedersehen, baby!

What better way to improve

As a Sun software employee, you have to understand where we have been positioning MySQL. Rather successfully as a matter of fact. We realized it is not an Oracle replacement at the high end. Enterprise Oracle customers are extremely unlikely to move from the highly proven, installed Oracle platform. The cost of problems far outweigh the cost of license. But in a large company, that type of installation represents a small portion of the installed repository space in a company. Thats where MySQL has "gotten in the back door".

It is a favorite of developers who put up and tear down architectures all the time. These projects were having problems getting into production on smaller deployments until Sun purchased MySQL and offered support. Customers now have the confidence to put it into production knowing they have a throat to choke. So the target market was these smaller systems in the enterprise and mostly smaller customers who were relying on MS SQL Server.

But to think an independent MySQL or PostGreSQL will grow its own "enterprise ready" gene stock through natural selection of open source AND be deployed at the enterprise level without rock solid support behind it shows lack of understanding of the market. By having Oracle contributing more to the MySQL code base, the faster it will gain these advanced database features. This will greatly benefit smaller companies (a huge market still) and larger companies in their non-enterprise deployments. But it will still be a tough sell to replace an enterprise level repository, even in 5 years. It would greatly enhance the database market to let customers work with one vendor (one throat to choke) that would allow them to start small and eventually grow into onto a full blown production system, or any other degree of sophistication they choose.

Splitting off MySQL into an independent company would only scare major corporations from utilizing emerging open source products in the future. Everyone of our customers who rely on Sun for MySQL support would now have to worry that their production deployments will be run by a new startup trying to get established and build their support capabilities.