Oracle kills Virtual Iron. Is MySQL next?

http://freedb2.com/2009/06/23/oracle-kills-virtual-iron-is-mysql-next/

by acangiano • 17 years ago

33 40 17 years ago

freedb2.com

bensummers3• 17 years ago

Even if they do stop developing it, will it make a difference?

Firstly, it's not like Sun were doing a great job of pushing it forward.

Secondly, MySQL is GPL and has an active community perfectly capable of forking it.

kungfudoi• 17 years ago

Even if and when Oracle kills MySQL, there's already a fork of it as of version 6.0 called Drizzle. More background information of this can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzle_%28database_server%29.

Official homepage: http://drizzle.org Blog: http://blog.drizzle.org Source code: https://launchpad.net/drizzle

edmccaffrey2• 17 years ago

Drizzle is not a valid choice for apps that require things like stored procs and triggers, which they removed. Of course, not every app requires what they remove; MariaDB is a fork by the core MySQL team, if those features are needed and MySQL cannot be used.

die_sekte2• 17 years ago

The last part looks like a thinly disguised advertisement of DB2.

Confusion• 17 years ago

Please note the domain name of the submitted URL.

die_sekte2• 17 years ago

Hm. I seem to have substantial troubles with obvious things.

rbanffy• 17 years ago

That is the beauty of free software: Oracle cannot kill MySQL. Never.

As long as there is an interested user, MySQL can be mantained and extended.

BTW, the whole site seems to be little more than a FUDfest.

prospero2• 17 years ago

I know this isn't the majority use case for people here, but if you ship MySQL alongside a closed-source product, you're required to buy a license. If Oracle stops selling licenses, that would screw over a fair number of people, open source notwithstanding.

spudlyo• 17 years ago

I'm not sure this is true anymore. The mysql client library (which your closed source product needs to talk to mysql) is GPL. Now you want your closed-source program to stay that way, so you have to either dig up the old public domain client library, or write your own. Now there is another option, the new libdrizzle library is BSD licensed and is MySQL compatible.

gaius• 17 years ago

That is the hilarity of it. Monty and his core team have set up their own company and are forking the code into MariaDB. So Sun basically paid $1Bn for the domain name mysql.com, that is the one asset that they can be said to actually own in this deal. And then Oracle bought Sun...

bcl• 17 years ago

I went to his talk at LFNW in April. Oracle/Sun own 'MySQL' in name and trademark only. The core IP, and more importantly the developers, are working with Monty on MariaDB. He was very clear that MySQL/MariaDB was not going to disappear.

bartl• 17 years ago

The prediction on this site is that MySQL Enterprise will die: those people for who the data is vital and irreplaceable, and who need competent and responsive support for when something goes wrong.

For ISPs and website owners, it won't make a difference.

c00p3r2• 17 years ago

Everyone still can fork it.

c00p3r2• 17 years ago

Everyone still can fork it.

ruby_roo• 17 years ago

When will PostgreSQL hit the tipping point? Sucker has been ripe for the pickin' for years.

mishmash2• 17 years ago

Does pgMyAdmin (or whatever the phpMyAdmin equivalent is called) still suck?

pivo• 17 years ago

Not in my opinion

cookiecaper2• 17 years ago

phpPgAdmin is okay, I think about on par with phpMyAdmin, but I prefer pgadmin3.

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

When it gets a different name.

I have a theory the difficult name drives people away before they ever give it a chance.

Looking at Wikipedia, it seems I might not be far off. Before you read anything about the features, there's an entire paragraph explaining the name: "The mixed-capitalization of the PostgreSQL name can confuse some people on first viewing..."

Given a blind choice, I suspect any SQL newbie deciding between which one to try first, would go with the friendly sounding "MySQL" vs the intimidating "Postgre(s..ql?!)".

fizx• 17 years ago

I switched my Rails development from mysql to postgresql for a few projects now. It's really nice to have sensible index usage, and good in-db fulltext.

I don't have the same comfort level though. I'm not sure how much is my familiarity with mysql, and how much is pg being legitimately harder.

rjurney2• 17 years ago

When the tools get a little friendlier. MySQL is still much easier to start working with. I prefer Postgres, but it is more difficult for the n00b.

cookiecaper2• 17 years ago

I don't think that's true at all; someone who started on MySQL is obviously more comfortable with the MySQL methods, but I can't think of anything about Postgres that makes it more difficult than MySQL for someone with no prior experience. PgSQL definitely has more advanced features, but they can generally be safely ignored if you don't want to utilize them.

duskwuff• 17 years ago

When it gets good native clustering support? Last time I checked, clustering support was still tentative, not heavily tested, and not in the core distribution.

chaostheory• 17 years ago

I didn't really like the article, but I think it indirectly brings up a good point. This is a good example of the risk you incur by using a proprietary platform (Virtual Iron). At any moment you can have the rug pulled out from under you.

piramida• 17 years ago

Article is so full of it pitching DB2 that it's not even funny. Oracle, as an active MySQL contributor (InnoDB) would of course maintain and support it for the lower end niche market, probably adding an easier migration path up to the full Oracle installation but nevertheless, it makes no sense for them to kill the product with millions of installations which is not competing with any of their products. Nobody gets Oracle for a php startup.

Unlike Virtual Iron, which I think is in a direct competition with VirtualBox so why keeping the worse one?

martin• 17 years ago

Agreed that it's not the same sort of situation. MySQL is obviously well known and has significant market share, and although Oracle is a competitor to some extent, Postgres is probably much more similar in terms of who the typical customer is.

And anyway, how many people here have heard of Virtual Iron, much less used it? There's good reason for that -- it's really, really bad, or at least it was 6 months ago. We had it for a while because our MIS group was too cheap to buy VMware. Its Java-based frontend was clunky and unstable. VMs would frequently hang when powered down or rebooted through the console, stuck in a "shutting down" state that could be resolved only by rebooting the physical box. On a number of occasions, the server inexplicably got in a state where none of the VMs would power on until the box was rebooted. Snapshotting was based on LVM, totally different (in a bad way) from how every other virtualization product I've ever seen works. The "console" feature was based on VNC, and as you might guess, extremely slow.

After some time, we finally shelled out for VMware ESX/VirtualCenter, which isn't perfect, but still a much better product. I don't know why Oracle bought VI to begin with, but I'm not exactly sad to see it go.

j_baker• 17 years ago

I still don't see why Oracle would kill off MySQL. I mean, they kept Berkley DB around. Could it be that just because two pieces of software are both databases doesn't mean that they do the same thing?

zandorg• 17 years ago

I tried to buy Berkeley DB last year and never got a reply. I think Sleepycat has gone on a long snooze.

bensummers3• 17 years ago

I managed to get a reply about two years ago. They want lots and lots of money, so the lack of reply probably saved you some time.

Elepsis• 17 years ago

The last time I checked, DB2 Express had some pretty substantial restrictions on a license agreement, and both Microsoft and Oracle provide free versions of their DBs with similar restrictions. I don't see a compelling reason for a business to choose DB2 over SQL Server or Oracle as a MySQL replacement -- let alone something like Postgres, which is the most logical (and cheapest) alternative.

dimarco• 17 years ago

It's like legalizing marijuana, I'd almost wish they'd just do it already so people can stop talking about it.

ii• 17 years ago

Oracle will kill MySQL, but the code behind it under the different name will kill Oracle sometime in the future. You can't fight the weather, working open source is unkillable.

uriel• 17 years ago

I hope so. And the day Oracle kills Java I'm going to throw a huge party.

Tamerlin• 17 years ago

I'd love that, especially after working with Ruby on Rails and C# and .NET MVC.

Going back to Java after those is almost painful it's so tedious.

Oracle kills Virtual Iron. Is MySQL next?

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