
Lesson: Oracle's driving MySQL to open core; don't sign contributor agreement - chaostheory
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/09/open-core-mysql/index.htm
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justin_vanw
Good news! Postgresql scales really well, and will always be open source.
Plus, it has more features and great compliance with the SQL standard.

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socratic
You're certainly not alone in hoping that MySQL loses market share to
PostgreSQL under Oracle's stewardship. I've always assumed that MySQL has been
more prevalent due to some combination of historically earlier user
friendliness, an incompatible SQL implementation, and feedback effects related
to the previous two factors.

That said, is there something that would be lost if everyone just switched
from MySQL to PostgreSQL tomorrow? What benefits does MySQL have over
PostgreSQL these days?

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fauigerzigerk
a) Clustered and covering indexes.

b) Non-transactional tables

Both allow you optimize the memory usage of some particularly problematic
cases, specifically very large, simple tables. Postgres cannot return data
directly from indexes (covering indexes). It always has to go back to the
table itself to fetch the actual data. If the table is large, that can be
inefficient for some types of queries.

Non-transactional tables use a lot less memory as well. For instance, if you
have a large table that represents a N:M relationship (id1 int, id2 int), the
two ints use 8 bytes of memory. A postgres table adds about 24 bytes per
record, three times the actual data, plus some overhead per page.

Don't take this to mean that MySQL is faster than Postgres. That's not
generally the case. The Postgres query optimizer is vastly better than
MySQL's. So for complex queries and data models, Postgres is way superior. The
big differences are always related to very specific data model and query
combinations, so general benchmarks are utterly useless.

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caf
Unlogged tables are now in Postgres as of release 9.1:
<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/release-9-1>

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fauigerzigerk
That's very good news! I have to look at the physical data structures and what
it means for memory usage though. "Unlogged" as such only means they don't use
WAL.

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Udo
Any MySQL hackers can always just leave this Oracle nightmare behind and join
MariaDB, it's a promising fork of the MySQL core and they're working hard on a
new storage engine for it.

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piotrSikora
...or Drizzle.

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goombastic
Oracle has typically been a licensing centric company. The "named user plus"
licensing thing can be unwieldy for most small firms. The past few years have
been bad for it as a result. SAAS based innovation, unconventional databases,
database scaling bottlenecks, parallelization, in-memory computing, mobility
and a lot of the low cost innovations around these have emerged as a threat to
Oracle. The options it has had are acquiring OpenSource and aggressively
defending patents. All the while its marketing teams continue to whitewash
offerings like exalogic as "cloud" offerings.

I feel that Oracle tends to explore options to corral innovation. Its
OpenSource portfolio is the classic trojan horse. Expect all sorts of lock-in.

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toyg
I'm sorry, you're sorely mistaken. I've worked at Oracle (been acquired) and
i've seen numbers. Licensing is not the main source of profits, support is;
they might sell it differently, but that's where they make the real dough. The
margins are astonishing. And look at the numbers they just posted about
Europe: +50%. At these levels, that's huge.

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goombastic
I agree. All I wanted to point out was the difficulty in using their stack if
you are a small firm or an innovator.

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jacques_chester
I guess Oracle just don't see MySQL as enough of a threat, or enough of a
profit opportunity, to shackle to the mothership with contributor agreements.

Indeed it might even speed up MySQL development, potentially undercutting
Oracle's serious open source rivals.

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Roboprog
Oracle has a problem in that PostgreSQL is somewhat of a threat, in terms of
features and similarity. OK, the default stored procedure language is not
exactly the same, but it's fairly close to PL/SQL.

Nobody is going to mistake MySQL for Oracle, and I suspect Oracle wants to
keep it that way, while dragging MySQL along just enough to prevent an exodus
of FOSS developers to PostgreSQL.

I should probably re-evaluate MySQL again, but they scared the Hell out of me
back in 2001 when I found it did not support rollback, nor foreign key
constraints, nor transaction isolation at the time. I KNOW THEY HAVE FIXED
THIS STUFF SINCE THEN, but the mentality that thought it was OK to leave that
stuff out??? I did enough xBASE stuff in the 80s to know I did not want to
back to that confusion. I would rather use an ISAM interface than debug query
planning in SQL, but having to use SQL, and getting none of the data integrity
benefits?!? Screw that!

Y'all enjoy your MySQL, and I hope the whole source code license issue works
out well for you :-)

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jacques_chester
I use Oracle at work, Postgres at home and MySQL only when I have to.

