Gerhard said:
Did you read too much Slashdot to spread such FUD?
I guess I should have used half a smiley, since I
was only half serious. Buying InnoBase OY was...an
interesting move. Cheap too! It's a while since I visited /.
For those who don't know, Oracle bought a small Finnish
company which developed the transaction-aware table-
backend for MySQL. As far as I understand, this means
nothing for GPL licensed MySQL installations, but if
MySQL sells commercial MySQL-database with transaction
support, I guess they need to share their incomes with
Oracle now, and I suppose Oracle is completely in charge
of future development and price setting for InnoDB. Of
course, MySQL has support for swapping table backends,
and the logical next step might be to use the major open
source transactional low level database Berkeley DB,
which is also dual licensed, and developed by SleepyCat.
Unfortuantely, Oracle just bought them... I'm sure there
are other ways out though. MySQL owns MaxDB, which was
previously SAP DB, a derivate ot the German Adabas D.
I'm not sure how easy it is to rip out the table back-
end of that though. I guess it's not built to be a
separate component.
Anyway, it's annoying with a product that so clearly do
things their own way, instead of the right way. It would
have been one thing if it had been something in a niche
of its own like SQLite, or something novel, such as an
object-relational database ten years ago, but what they've
done is often just non-standard without being better, and
in many aspects buggy and lacking features.
From a market point of view, I do think that they have
been refreshing, and it was probably good for PostgreSQL
to have competition too, but I would have liked a somewhat
stronger interest in the SQL standard from those guys.
From this perspective I don't think Monty and Mårten are
better than Bill and Bullmer over in Redmond. They create
vendor lock-in, and a warped view of how things are supposed
to work among many naive developers. While it's obviously
more of an industrial strength product (in its own way) it
does remind me a lot of MS Access / JET. "Let's do something
similar to SQL, and call it SQL, but don't bother looking
at any standards, let's just code what pops up in our minds."
It's one thing if Oracle fails to comply to all standards,
with strange things as treating empty strings as nulls. At
least they can claim that their product had a large installed
base before the standards were set... Hm... That's actually
a rather crappy excuse too... That's what varchar2 was for.
MySQL 5 could be described as one, according to the feature list, and if
you use a transactional table type.
Neither you nor I choose DBMS by ticking off checkboxes
in a list...
I myself won't bother with it because PostgreSQL is still more
featureful that MySQL 5, has a much longer track record with these
features proven stable and a more liberal licensing.
How surprising! ;^) Me too by the way... I've had quite a
happy cooperation with Oracle, Informix, Ingres, Mimer,
Sybase and DB2 too. They all have their problems, but I
prefer them to MySQL any day.
