On Feb 14, 2006, at 7:32 PM, Khalid B wrote:
Oracle bought SleepyCat, the makers of the Berkeley DB that powers MySQL's BDB tables.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/15/0018241
If you look at the MySQL documentation there have been hints about not using BDB for a while. Nobody that I know uses it.
Previously, they bought InnoBase, makers of InnoDB.
I spoke with the chief architect of MySQL a few weeks ago after Oracle purchased InnoDB. He assured me that that serious InnoDB commits were on track and things seemed to be business as usual. I am much more hopeful about MySQL MaxDB, http://www.mysql.com/ products/maxdb/, which is used to run some of the largest enterprise databases for SAP. There is brutal competition going on in the database market today with Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft each trying to ensure they control the data. What's good for us is that for our very simple needs the big players have declared their support for making commodity databases readily available. IBM offers free DB2 for up to four processors. So I can get a quad opteron box and put 20GB of RAM in it and serve it for free. I don't see too many people bumping up against that limit any time soon. Oracle buys InnoDB and SleepyCat ensuring that the millions of MySQL users have the best path forward to grow up into Oracle. Oracle has a track record of treating great engineers well, and everyone else poorly so I think we will continue to see solid innovation in this space. If not MaxDB is a perfectly reasonable alternative that will give us all the advanced DB usage Drupal will need in the for seeable future. Microsoft is embedding SQL server into the next version of windows and despite wanting to turn SQL server into a 10 Billion dollar revenue stream, Microsoft is still trying to give as many copies of SQL server away as possible for the enterprise. Competition is fierce with no monopoly in sight, and we have outstanding Open Source alternatives if there is a monopoly. We win. If you saw Rasmus's talk about PHP in Amsterdam, you will realize that Zend != PHP. When Zend is acquired by Oracle, they will quickly enterprise class PHP. This means brain dead design by corporate committee a la Java community process. Despite that PHP will be able to run in a shared memory space in the most complex environments and become compatible with other object models as Java did with C and C++. Expect a whole new wave of corporate buzz word bingo as dynamic languages are adapted into the enterprise. e.g. web services, service oriented architectures. Who cares, we are all going to be writing everything in the Drupal javascript framework soon enough anyway :-) Kieran
This can spell financial trouble for MySQL AB (the company), since they rely on Inno for non-GPL licensed versions.
MyISAM is still there, but for commerical applications, this may be bad news.
Here is my take on it. http://baheyeldin.com/technology/software/oracle-is-becoming-too- powerful-after-open-source-shopping-spree.html