[members at lugog] Help save MySQL; Sign the petition (fwd)

[Sean Miller]

This is an interesting article.  As many of you know, I worked in an
Oracle environment for 17 years and - indeed - I have been quite
amazed how in the last decade MySQL has gone from being almost a "toy
rdbms" to a product that rivals the Oracle RDBMS in many ways, the
only real area in which I'd say it was still somewhat behind now being
Grid Computing and distributed databases.

Towards the end of the 90s, and the early part of the last decade, it
was quite noticeable that Oracle shifted their focus from products to
architecture.  The facility to run a database on many servers as one
instance, with the ability to "hot plug" servers in and out, is very
impressive and Amazon (as an example) is using this to great effect.
The JDeveloper J2EE suite is also an impressive product, up there with
IBM Websphere, BEA and JBoss.   Whilst MySQL has been very much
focused on developing the database engine, Oracle has been very much
focused on the structure around.

Under Oracle ownership would MySQL suffer?   This is the crux of the
matter, I think, and one that probably doesn't have a simple answer.

Personally, I think that Oracle's potential acquisition of Sun is far
more to do with the ownership of Java as a concept than MySQL.  As
Oracle's products become more and more reliant on Java it makes sense
for Larry Ellison's company to consider bringing the core architecture
under its wings.  As for MySQL, I could well see the RDBMS merge with
Oracle's own - perhaps as an "Oracle Lite".  Oracle already has such a
product, "Oracle 10G Express Edition", which is basically the Oracle
10G RDBMS but with limitations.  It will only, for instance, use 1GB
of memory maximum, has a maximum instance size of 4GB and will only
use 1 processor.  Could it be that MySQL will replace the Express
Editions of Oracle, or be merged with same, suddenly also giving
Oracle a foothold in the SME and home server market?  Certainly 10GEE
would perfectly well fulfil the requirements of many MySQL users.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html

Ultimately mergers and acquisitions occur, and in the IT marketplace
we are constantly seeing it happen.  When I started working
professionally in IT, back in 1988, the three big names in Relational
Databases were Oracle, Ingres and Sybase.  Sybase did, of course, get
swallowed up by Bill Gates and reemerged on the other side as "SQL
Server".  Ingres committed commercial suicide by refusing to offer an
upgrade path between two versions of their Forms product and
eventually were taken over by Computer Associates who then proceeded
to pretty much halt development on the product and - later - Open
Sourced it.   Oracle benefitted from the demise of Ingres, picking up
many of their customers, and over the 90s turned what was a relatively
small company into one of the largest IT empires in the world.

Ingres now -- http://www.ingres.com/

I doubt that petitions will stop any merger, and if they do one has to
consider what the long term viability of Sun might be without that
investment.  When I started in IT Sun was a much bigger player in the
server market than it is now, right up there with HP and IBM.   Would
Sun going out of business help MySQL?  It would be great to have a
crystal ball and be able to predict what the future of MySQL Is likely
to be under Oracle ownership, but we must also consider where MySQL
would go should Sun cease to exist as a company.

Not to mention Openoffice and/or Staroffice.

Is a Sun under Oracle ownership a lesser or worse evil than no Sun at all?

Sean