[development] Oracle buys SleepyCat

[Kieran Lal]

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
>