
Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB - doppp
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/29/alibaba-mariadb/
======
jjirsa
Good move, will be good for the database for sure. I think of this article [0]
every time someone says "why not just use <some hipster database written by 2
people over the course of a year>":

Rule 1: Developing a good DBMS requires 5-7 years and tens of millions of
dollars.

That’s if things go extremely well.

Rule 2: You aren’t an exception to Rule 1.

0: [http://www.dbms2.com/2013/03/18/dbms-development-
marklogic-h...](http://www.dbms2.com/2013/03/18/dbms-development-marklogic-
hadoop/)

~~~
orf
Has Postgres received tens of millions of dollars in funding?

~~~
jpollock
If you assume an average 10 person years of development effort over the 20
year history of Postgres, absolutely.

20 years * LoadedLaborCost (USD$150k/personyr) * 10 people

=>USD$30m.

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jdhawk
Good for MariaDB - they're really pushing the MySQL ecosystem forward at an
incredible pace.

RocksDB from Facebook, ColumnStore, MaxScale...really cool stuff.

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svisser
For context, Alibaba uses their own fork of MySQL which is AliSQL:

[https://github.com/alibaba/AliSQL](https://github.com/alibaba/AliSQL)

~~~
smaili
I'm curious what would be their motivation for investing so much in MariaDB
when they already have their own? Hedging bets? Encouraging competition?

~~~
buahahaha
Getting out of the business of having their own?

~~~
dward
With Alibaba cloud, infrastructure like databases is their business. Take AWS
Aurora and GCP Spanner as examples.

~~~
andreasklinger
But it's also easier to sell a standard DB people already know vs a custom

(see (google) Bigtable vs (amazon) Postgres)

~~~
darkr
Odd comparison, Google has supported MySQL for a long time, as has AWS.

Dynamo might be a slightly closer comparison

~~~
dward
Google Cloud SQL supports postgres as well.

~~~
andreasklinger
that's kind of my point

databases people know and use already (eg in fun projects) are easier to sell

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ppeetteerr
Any time I hear that a Chinese company is investing in a product I use, it's
as if the Chinese government is now part owner of it as well. This may be
general paranoia, but given the latest crackdown on VPNs and privacy, I don't
know that I want a foreign government with a significant stake in Alibaba have
access to direct the future of MariaDB. Is anyone else feeling this?

~~~
patrickaljord
Not everything has to be about politics. Sometimes a big company investing in
an open source database it already uses is just trying to improve its own
infrastructure, not trying to hack your country.

~~~
scarmig
That's besides the point. Even if every single employee at Alibaba is well-
intentioned (which is close enough to reality to be considered the case), in
the end the government of the PRC has the capability to coerce the company to
exert influence in a direction we almost certainly wouldn't like. The only
question is whether the PRC would consider the trade offs worth it.

~~~
sangnoir
> in the end the government of the PRC has the capability to coerce the
> company to exert influence in a direction we almost certainly wouldn't like.

It's open source- when that happens, you can fork it and influence it in the
direction that _you_ like. I mean if the GCHQ has an active github account[1]
- I think the PRC gets a pass to publish open source, let alone Alibaba.

1\. [https://github.com/gchq](https://github.com/gchq)

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cwyers
I don't really understand the MariaDB love around here. If you look at actual
production usage, MySQL gets the lion's share, looking at the customers each
lists at their website. Oracle has been surprisingly benevolent as stewards of
MySQL. That Business Source License that MariaDB put forward for new code at
one point[1] looked like something I think would have cost an awful lot of
goodwill if anyone else had used it.

1) [https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb](https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb)

~~~
noncoml
Actually:

\- MariaDB MaxScale 2.0 will be under the BSL.

\- MariaDB Server will continue to be licensed under GPL in perpetuity, while
its connectors will continue to be under the LGPL.

To be honest I cannot blame Monty. Google and Facebook were built on MySQL and
probably didn't give back as much as he thought would be a fair shar. I guess
he doesn't want to see this happening again.

~~~
stephenr
He’s free to do what he wants with his company.

The problem is all these people going into headless chicken mode about how
Oracle could discontinue the open source licence of the “original” MySQL, so
they’re embracing MariaDB (the company) because it’s run by Monty so it must
be open source friendly.

You can use/support MariaDB all you want but let’s not pretend they’re great
bastions of open source compared to Oracle in the MySQL realm.

~~~
noncoml
The grand parent made it sound as if they changed the MariaDB server license,
so I wanted to make a clarification that this is not the case.

~~~
stephenr
Not really. S/he referenced the BSL, which MariaDB (the company) absolutely
uses for it's MaxScale product.

~~~
noncoml
> That Business Source License that MariaDB put forward for new code at one
> point

As I said, I just made a clarification on that “new code” means other products
and not MariaDB server.

Just for the record I am not a MySQL-based DB user, so I don’t really care at
all about MariaDB or BSL. My license of choice for releasing my code is AGPL.

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osrec
Really very happy about this. I would love for MariaDB to outpace MySQL in
terms of features, as I'm never quite sure which direction Oracle will take
with MySQL (especially in terms of licensing)!

~~~
stephenr
It’s ironic in a tragic way that people fear monger about Oracle changing the
MySQL license (which has not changed from before Monty sold it to Sun) and
advocate for a fork operated by a company that shits on the very concept of
open source.

If the MariaDB MaxScale licensing bullshittery didn’t make you think twice
about relying on MariaDB, why do you worry about Oracle?

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gaius
Wow. Monty made a cool billion from Sun. Why does he need external investors
now? How can MariaDB possibly have blown through that epic fortune?

~~~
jamesblonde
He only made 300m. Us other MySQL employees (about 250) shared crumbs for that
purchase (VPs excepted). He screwed us, but he never had respect for us -
"people are lazy and greedy" ([https://www.pythian.com/blog/mysql-ceo-marten-
mickos-intervi...](https://www.pythian.com/blog/mysql-ceo-marten-mickos-
interviewed/)) . Then he promised he would fix the mistake he made with Maria
by being more generous. Ha.

~~~
jacquesm
Funny use of the word 'only'.

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snowman311
Just looked through the Crunchbase profiles of a few Western SQL/NoSQL
database companies, and I did not see any Chinese investors. This investment
will certainly give MariaDB a significant competitive advantage in China. It
will be interesting to see if other startups follow their strategy.

------
unixhero
Strange, why not go for postgres

~~~
autotune
Probably because they don't use it:
[http://techstacks.io/alibaba](http://techstacks.io/alibaba)

~~~
zerr
What's the reason nowadays to use MySQL/MariaDB instead of PostgreSQL?

~~~
icelancer
In-memory capability, hiring pool of MySQL/MariaDB developers tends to be
larger/wider, Galera cluster (M-M functionality), if the queries trend towards
simplicity then MySQL/MariaDB tends to be more performant, Postgres can have
issues with write amplification, etc.

Uber (I know, I know) switched to MySQL, here are some reasons why:

[https://eng.uber.com/mysql-migration/](https://eng.uber.com/mysql-migration/)

~~~
j_s
Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12166585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12166585)

Re: Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12179222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12179222)

Why we lost Uber as a user |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12201353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12201353)

> naming / pronunciation diversion:
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12201672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12201672)

~~~
merb
please don't use uber as an example. they made just so many mistakes with
postgresql (mistakes that would probably blow up a ton of databases including
mysql)

~~~
technion
The fact is there are decision makers - often non-technical ones - who do look
at Uber as an example.

It's something we should at least consider an issue, even if it doesn't feel
like a valid technical issue.

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jim_d
happy to see MariaDB getting some investment, hoping it will continue growing.

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starrychloe
Chinese government is leading a $27M infiltration, code injection, and
backdoor scheme in MariaDB in order to steal and hack account information for
millions of sites around the world.

~~~
whooshee
Proofs? or you are just another troll.

