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back to article MySQL fork duo tear down Oracle's Iron Man fantasy

The battle to own MySQL is over and Oracle executives are fanning out to woo open sourcers, but MySQL luminaries have mobilized to win the hearts and minds of DBAs and developers. MySQL father Michael - Monty - Widenius and leading MySQL architect Brian Aker spoke separately at the annual MySQL Con in Santa Clara, California, …

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  1. Daniel B.
    Boffin

    innoDB

    My question would be: are they planning on implementing something like InnoDB? MySQL by itself isn't very useful thanks to Monty's "we don't need no steeeeenkin' transactions" mentality, thus MyISAM lacks transactions.

    If any fork wants to free intself from Oracle, it should implement a transactional engine as well. Otherwise, it will remain at the mercy of Oracle.

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  2. Matthew Barker
    Thumb Down

    Give them a refund, Monty

    Monty sold the company. Apparently, he thought he could keep control.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Sponsors

    "The spectacle was made bizarre by the fact that MySQL is now owned by database giant Oracle, which is listed as a "founding sponsor" of O'Reilly Media's MySQL Con."

    What makes it even more surreal is that, for a long time, Oracle didn't even appear on the list of conference sponsors. Monty Program AB was the Platinum sponsor, so they had to make up the "founding" category when Oracle finally got around to deciding that they wanted to sponsor the main event for their own product.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Oracle did not make decision; Sun had to be force to allow it

      Oracle did not make the decision. Enough MySQL staff finally nudged the somnolent Sun management by saying the competition were doing the show without MySQL. Sun was operating on a 'business as usual while we wait for the UC' ruling and MySQL's usual business was the annual conference. So Karin Padir, Sun's head of MySQL gave permission for MySQL to be part of the MySQL Conference. Of course after the Oracle takeover, Oracle upper management went nuts wanting to know who authorized what.

      Oracle underwhelmed core MySQl-ers since the take over and underwhelmed the community with the keynote speech on Monday.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Toy

    When you work with a real RDBMS (like Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server) on your day job, you need a toy so that you can show your kids what you do to pay for the rent. MySQL is ideally suited for that. After all, constant loss of rows does not matter.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Troll

      Yawn...

      <-- Says it all, really.

      Move along please... And take your "real" RDBMS with you. We don't want it.

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  5. Mark 65

    Support...

    "The whole release model for software is dead... when I talk to companies that are innovating they care about what they can get their hands on today. They don't need to hear about a roadmap in two to three years - that's not internet time."

    No, but they do like stability and knowing the release they are on will still be supported for fixes into the future. Big companies have to also perform this weird thing called end-to-end testing before changing versions in order to satisfy audit and regulatory requirements. The reason most don't update on a whim. I somehow see Oracle managing to offer something here. Cost would be their typical stumbling block.

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  6. Victor 2
    FAIL

    heh...

    If I was Wideanus, I would keep quiet for a while before appearing in public after all he did... maybe change my name and face too.

    After his attacks on code ownership, NOW (after he is left with no other choice) he wants to be a MySQL support company... of course.

    Thanks but no thanks.. Drizzle OTOH is very interesting, let's see where it gets.

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  7. baswell
    Paris Hilton

    If you want open, use PostgreSQL

    I don't get why some are fighting so hard to make MySQL truly open when there is a better database out there that has the most open of all licenses: BSD licensed PostgreSQL.

    MySQL has always had and always will have a corporate overlord and confusing dual licensing. That's not going to change any time soon.

    Just give up and move on.

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  8. Solomon Grundy
    Badgers

    Fork It.

    Let them fork it. They can fork it all day if they want. Who cares. There isn't a real business behind it (a website, a free product, and a bunch of chinbeards does not constitute a business). Who cares if some other 3rd party takes it over. That's what OSS is all about right, each to their own and if 'you' don't like it 'you' can make it better all by yourself, or with whatever little corner of the "community" you manage to talk into free labor. .

    We're happy and profitable paying for our SQL Server licenses and we don't have to worry about crap like this.

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  9. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    Iron Man has been hacked several times.

    I think the last time was by the Skrull Empire of the Andromeda Galaxy, and they did work on the hack for years, plant agents who could pass as human including a fake for The Astonishing Ant-Man - so it was a really sustained attack. But he's also been taken by the armour itself when it became sentient due to a really bad Y2K bug, by Amadeus Cho, the teenaged sixth or seventh smartest person on the planet, using electromagnetic pulse, and for years Tony Stark was secretly an agent of Kang the Conqueror, Lord of the Fortieth Century. At least he quit drinking, except for Ultimate Universe Iron Man.

    Stil, you should ask your board whether they really want to entrust their data to this guy. I mean, that's crazy talk.

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    1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      On reflection, Iron Man has been penetrated BY Ant-Man...

      ...the second one; Scott Lang. I think.

      But he was only looking for the reset switch. Or something.

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    @PostgreSQL

    Besides the licensing issue, it appears that this is actually something that deserves the label "relational database management system".

    MySQL would be properly labelled "My SQL hairball that stores rows with a confidence of less than 100% to get them back in a week".

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  11. Gaius
    FAIL

    You could always...

    ... give Sun's, now Oracle's, shareholders their billion dollars back, Monty.

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Really?

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/wtf_32.png

    Monty is a crybaby because he lost control at MySQL and couldn't get it back at Sun. He left and now wants you to pay money for MariaDB which doesn't work. This product is more buggy than MySQL 5.1 when it was released and doesn't live up to its claims. Does Monty blog about MariaDB not being ready for primetime like he did about MySQL 5.1? No he doesn't because he wants your money and he wants to try and make those that didn't let him have control look bad. Licensing is only an issue for distribution and OEM. It really doesn't have an impact otherwise. Don't mention about owning your contributions, copyrights, etc. If one is truly about innovation and openness then they really don't care about that. They just care that the 'improvements' and 'innovation' make it into the code.

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  13. Frumious Bandersnatch
    WTF?

    order-of-magnitude improvement?

    between the 5.4 and 5.5 versions? This seems a smidgeon unbelievable to me. Everyone knows that means 10x faster, right? Someone is definitely telling pork pies here.

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