The Oracle and MySQL RDBMS are very different products. This makes me happy. I used to work on the Oracle RDBMS. It has a lot of features that do amazing things. Unfortunately, this also makes it extremely hard to modify. MySQL doesn’t have as many features. This makes it easier to modify. This also means there are a lot of things to fix in it when you care about high-performance and high-availability OLTP workloads.
But now we have a new story emerging from an independent source of news on the Oracle-Sun merger.
One more week won’t change the fact that MySQL competes fiercely with Oracle’s database products including its flagship ‘11g’ across all major market segments.
What does this mean besides a few more months of uncertainty for people at Sun/MySQL? Do they compete for customers? Or do they compete based on technology? We can only guess as the report is not public. I am sure it is a great document, at least that is what I have been told.
Can we get this done and return our focus to the roadmap for 5.4, 6.0 and the MySQL User Conference? I would much rather bicker about who doesn’t get to present at the conference, the rate at which community patches are accepted and my inability to republish an edited version of MySQL docs. MySQL would otherwise be on a roll right now with the progress they have made on 5.1 (it is a great release) and with work in progress for future releases.
Update
Wow, maybe the GPL means something. Eben Moglen finds factual errors in the still-secret statement of objections.
Tags: MySQL