Oracle kills Virtual Iron. Is MySQL next? | Hacker News Reader

Oracle kills Virtual Iron. Is MySQL next?

freedb2.com

33 pointsacangiano40 comments

That is the beauty of free software: Oracle cannot kill MySQL. Never.

As long as there is an interested user, MySQL can be mantained and extended.

BTW, the whole site seems to be little more than a FUDfest.

I know this isn't the majority use case for people here, but if you ship MySQL alongside a closed-source product, you're required to buy a license. If Oracle stops selling licenses, that would screw over a fair number of people, open source notwithstanding.

I'm not sure this is true anymore. The mysql client library (which your closed source product needs to talk to mysql) is GPL. Now you want your closed-source program to stay that way, so you have to either dig up the old public domain client library, or write your own. Now there is another option, the new libdrizzle library is BSD licensed and is MySQL compatible.

MySQL is still selling licenses to someone, so I don't think it's as simple as that.

That is the hilarity of it. Monty and his core team have set up their own company and are forking the code into MariaDB. So Sun basically paid $1Bn for the domain name mysql.com, that is the one asset that they can be said to actually own in this deal. And then Oracle bought Sun...

I went to his talk at LFNW in April. Oracle/Sun own 'MySQL' in name and trademark only. The core IP, and more importantly the developers, are working with Monty on MariaDB. He was very clear that MySQL/MariaDB was not going to disappear.

The prediction on this site is that MySQL Enterprise will die: those people for who the data is vital and irreplaceable, and who need competent and responsive support for when something goes wrong.

For ISPs and website owners, it won't make a difference.

Article is so full of it pitching DB2 that it's not even funny. Oracle, as an active MySQL contributor (InnoDB) would of course maintain and support it for the lower end niche market, probably adding an easier migration path up to the full Oracle installation but nevertheless, it makes no sense for them to kill the product with millions of installations which is not competing with any of their products. Nobody gets Oracle for a php startup.

Unlike Virtual Iron, which I think is in a direct competition with VirtualBox so why keeping the worse one?

Agreed that it's not the same sort of situation. MySQL is obviously well known and has significant market share, and although Oracle is a competitor to some extent, Postgres is probably much more similar in terms of who the typical customer is.

And anyway, how many people here have heard of Virtual Iron, much less used it? There's good reason for that -- it's really, really bad, or at least it was 6 months ago. We had it for a while because our MIS group was too cheap to buy VMware. Its Java-based frontend was clunky and unstable. VMs would frequently hang when powered down or rebooted through the console, stuck in a "shutting down" state that could be resolved only by rebooting the physical box. On a number of occasions, the server inexplicably got in a state where none of the VMs would power on until the box was rebooted. Snapshotting was based on LVM, totally different (in a bad way) from how every other virtualization product I've ever seen works. The "console" feature was based on VNC, and as you might guess, extremely slow.

After some time, we finally shelled out for VMware ESX/VirtualCenter, which isn't perfect, but still a much better product. I don't know why Oracle bought VI to begin with, but I'm not exactly sad to see it go.

When will PostgreSQL hit the tipping point? Sucker has been ripe for the pickin' for years.

Does pgMyAdmin (or whatever the phpMyAdmin equivalent is called) still suck?

Not in my opinion

It's been a long time since I've tried it, but will try again soon. From the guided tour, it looks impressive:

http://www.pgadmin.org/visualtour.php

phpPgAdmin is okay, I think about on par with phpMyAdmin, but I prefer pgadmin3.

When it gets a different name.

I have a theory the difficult name drives people away before they ever give it a chance.

Looking at Wikipedia, it seems I might not be far off. Before you read anything about the features, there's an entire paragraph explaining the name: "The mixed-capitalization of the PostgreSQL name can confuse some people on first viewing..."

Given a blind choice, I suspect any SQL newbie deciding between which one to try first, would go with the friendly sounding "MySQL" vs the intimidating "Postgre(s..ql?!)".

I switched my Rails development from mysql to postgresql for a few projects now. It's really nice to have sensible index usage, and good in-db fulltext.

I don't have the same comfort level though. I'm not sure how much is my familiarity with mysql, and how much is pg being legitimately harder.

When the tools get a little friendlier. MySQL is still much easier to start working with. I prefer Postgres, but it is more difficult for the n00b.

I don't think that's true at all; someone who started on MySQL is obviously more comfortable with the MySQL methods, but I can't think of anything about Postgres that makes it more difficult than MySQL for someone with no prior experience. PgSQL definitely has more advanced features, but they can generally be safely ignored if you don't want to utilize them.

the free, standard gui for mysql is much easier to use than the free gui for postgresql. (mysql query browser vs. pgadmin III).

Dare I say that you started on postgres? :)

The commands are more obscure.

When it gets good native clustering support? Last time I checked, clustering support was still tentative, not heavily tested, and not in the core distribution.

Even if they do stop developing it, will it make a difference?

Firstly, it's not like Sun were doing a great job of pushing it forward.

Secondly, MySQL is GPL and has an active community perfectly capable of forking it.

Even if and when Oracle kills MySQL, there's already a fork of it as of version 6.0 called Drizzle. More background information of this can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzle_%28database_server%29.

Official homepage: http://drizzle.org Blog: http://blog.drizzle.org Source code: https://launchpad.net/drizzle

Drizzle is not a valid choice for apps that require things like stored procs and triggers, which they removed. Of course, not every app requires what they remove; MariaDB is a fork by the core MySQL team, if those features are needed and MySQL cannot be used.

They're planning to add "server side scripting" in any language to replace stored procedures. It sounds quite cool.

http://krow.livejournal.com/638941.html

I have been writing extensions to Postgresql in C++ recently, and it's amazing what you can do if you have the full flexibility of loading a .so into the db process and doing whatever you want.

I didn't mean to imply that it is no longer a useful or interesting piece of software; just that it is not a simple migration for some project that specifically use MySQL features.

I did the same thing in SQL Server, too, so it's not a new concept and the other RDBMs with that ability still have a use for traditional stored procs.

My experience with both stored procs and running actual programming languages on the database is that one does not replace the other; but I'll wait with an open mind to see.

The last part looks like a thinly disguised advertisement of DB2.

Please note the domain name of the submitted URL.

Hm. I seem to have substantial troubles with obvious things.

I didn't really like the article, but I think it indirectly brings up a good point. This is a good example of the risk you incur by using a proprietary platform (Virtual Iron). At any moment you can have the rug pulled out from under you.

I still don't see why Oracle would kill off MySQL. I mean, they kept Berkley DB around. Could it be that just because two pieces of software are both databases doesn't mean that they do the same thing?

I tried to buy Berkeley DB last year and never got a reply. I think Sleepycat has gone on a long snooze.

I managed to get a reply about two years ago. They want lots and lots of money, so the lack of reply probably saved you some time.

The last time I checked, DB2 Express had some pretty substantial restrictions on a license agreement, and both Microsoft and Oracle provide free versions of their DBs with similar restrictions. I don't see a compelling reason for a business to choose DB2 over SQL Server or Oracle as a MySQL replacement -- let alone something like Postgres, which is the most logical (and cheapest) alternative.

It's like legalizing marijuana, I'd almost wish they'd just do it already so people can stop talking about it.

Oracle will kill MySQL, but the code behind it under the different name will kill Oracle sometime in the future. You can't fight the weather, working open source is unkillable.

I hope so. And the day Oracle kills Java I'm going to throw a huge party.

I'd love that, especially after working with Ruby on Rails and C# and .NET MVC.

Going back to Java after those is almost painful it's so tedious.

Everyone still can fork it.

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