Will A New MySQL Rise From Former Employees?

from the open-source-wonders dept

Fri, Apr 24th 2009 3:49pm — Mike Masnick

With Oracle purchasing Sun, there's been some fretting over whether or not the company will harm MySQL (which Sun bought a few years back), as it's certainly a competitor to Oracle's core database product. My guess is that Oracle's a lot more interested in owning Java than harming MySQL, and am hopeful that Oracle recognizes the benefits of supporting MySQL. But, even if the company does go in the other direction, it's difficult to see much to worry about. The demand and opportunity for an open source database is so big, that others would quickly pop up (and, of course, there are already other open source databases out there -- some of which are already considered superior to MySQL). However, even more interesting is the news (pointed to us by Tim Lee) that many of MySQL's main developers have left the company (or are planning to), and one of MySQL's founders is already looking to hire other key MySQL developers to fork the software and keep on developing the software. Sometimes it's pretty difficult for a fork to get the attention it needs to survive, but certainly it can work, especially if there are concerns about the direction of the original product.

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Filed Under: forks, mysql, open source

7 Comments

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Jim Gaudet (profile), 24 Apr 2009 @ 7:26pm

What's superior to MySQL
and OpeNSource? Can you let me know, I would like to check them out.

Thanks,
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Tom, 25 Apr 2009 @ 5:48am

Re: What's superior to MySQL
Postrgesql
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Adam, 25 Apr 2009 @ 9:28am

PHP Group, where art though
Something tells me PHP developers wouldent allow MySQL to die. Sure, maybe it won't have the same name (PHPSQL anyone?), but the way that PHP would call the database would not change. MySQL is still the most widly-used database for PHP developers, and i doubt the PHP Group would allow for it to die off. Maybe by purchasing MySQL off from oracle would be the best solution at this time.
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DB, 25 Apr 2009 @ 9:44pm

Re: Re: What's superior to MySQL
Unfortunately Postgresql has the same problem that Oracle has. Lack of support for case insensitive queries. Otherwise my company would use it instead of Mysql.
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alternatives(), 26 Apr 2009 @ 9:52am

http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/173

If you're willing to use postgresql-specific extensions, you can use
ILIKE (same as LIKE but case-insensitive) or the ~ and ~* operators for
case-sensitive and case-insensitive POSIX regular expressions, respectively.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.3/static/functions-matching.html

The keyword ILIKE can be used instead of LIKE to make the match case insensitive according to the active locale. This is not in the SQL standard but is a PostgreSQL extension.

Who cares about MySQL - just use PostgreSQL. Every argument I've seen against this is ignorance or laziness.
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tukam, 23 May 2009 @ 6:11am

OMUNTU
"Omuntu" at work! It can never be operational without other wares interpolating.
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Web Developer, 18 Dec 2010 @ 12:07am

What is the legal aspect to open source
I am not aware if there are some laws by which you can come up with a license which can force anyone to never commercialize anything with an intention of keeping open source and free at the start.
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