One of the biggest questions that the open source community might well be asking after Oracle's recent acquisition of Sun: what will happen to MySQL?
MySQL is one of the most successful open source relational database management systems (RDBMS) ever. Since its first release in 1995, the program has been skyrocketing to ubiquity, taking pride in at least 11 million installations in various company back-ends.
When MySQL AB, the company that owned the database program, merged with Sun early last year, some sectors thought it was a start of something big. But as the months progressed, we saw departures of some of the old MySQL bigwigs. A sign that all was not well. Disagreements regarding directions perhaps?
Now, with this latest development, we won't be surprised if the direction that Oracle takes would not suit the MySQL community well. Oracle has its own line of database systems and the most impressive ones at that. Sure we can imagine that they'll be receiving Sun's Java with open arms.
But to be as warm to a competing product?
Still, if you really think about it, the conditions might just be right to do so. With the state of the economy, many companies are sure to look for inexpensive alternatives for their database needs. Now, when you talk about inexpensive options, two are sure to stand out: PostgreSQL and MySQL. This should be reason enough for Oracle to retain MySQL. At least for the time being.
The answer as to what they would do with it when the economy stabilizes can wait.
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1 comments:
PostgreSQL has been talked about quite a bit recently as *the* alternative. I have always been a huge MySQL fan, but this really, really saddens me.
I'll probably wait for a while, I'm not sure exactly how open any of the MySQL releases were, so maybe there is a possibility of a free fork somewhere down the line.
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