"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Thursday, April 24, 2008

Open Is As Open Does Or Some Such

At ONLamp, Todd Ogasawara points out some potentially harsh consequences associated with, if not attributable to, Sun's $$$ purchase of MySQL...

If the model of selling services does not justify something like a billion dollar price tag, what then? For MySQL and Sun, the answer is to provide more value-added features for a price and closing the source.

Am I happy about this? Not hardly! But, I saw this coming and have been preparing for it. I’ve been looking at PostgreSQL since the day Sun announced buying MySQL. And, recently, it was pointed out to me that Ingres (which I used back in the 1980s) is now an Open Source product. I’m not going to suddenly stop using MySQL or recommend that people switch away from it. But, I think it is prudent to take a look at alternatives.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Really as a DBMS, both are equally poor.

MySQL misses things like hot-backups, select clauses in a from statement for a view eg: select * from (select * from)

PostGreSQL does a delete/insert instead of a row update, which causes a need for constant "vacuuming"

The only real choice that we've decided on is one of those enterprisey RDBMS's that has been around for years. Yes, you pay for it, but in the end we've spent far more time and money trying to use MySQL than a license costs.

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About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.