The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 5 (of 5)

MYSQL in trouble

When someone comes to bite half your ass off, pretend that it does not matter and you actually welcome them taking an interest in it. Their days of high growth will not continue- at the best.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1606451,00.asp

Anon
Friday, June 4, 2004

You are mistaken. Almost every rebms is superior in features. You know my MySQL is not in trouble. Cause it's fast, damn fast and works very well with PHP.

Different horses for different courses. MySQL and Ingres are not competitors.

Mike
Friday, June 4, 2004

Old news.
MySQL has always lived more on community support than anything else. Postgress and firebird has been out there for a long time but that doesnt seem to affect MySQL. Remember MySQL is quite a small company with modest needs in terms of revenue. They dont have to rule the world.

Eric Debois
Friday, June 4, 2004

Let me get right to porting my database to some dead CA pile ol' junk. Sounds like a great way to blow some corporate cash.

christopher baus (www.baus.net)
Friday, June 4, 2004

Bah. Everybody knows that IMS is coming back and will whip *everybody*, once IBM open sources it. ;)

Flamebait Sr.
Friday, June 4, 2004

Is MySQL profitably yet or are they still burning VC cash?

Arnie
Friday, June 4, 2004

From what I know, they never were VC-funded.

Egor
Friday, June 4, 2004

Who cares? Those of us who wanted a full-featured open-source RDBMS are already using Postgres.

Wally
Friday, June 4, 2004

So CA open sources Ingres.

MySQL already has the right to distribute GPL and sell commercial licenses to a similar heavy-weight database, SAP's former SAPdb (which MySQL has renamed to 'MaxDB').

And as others have said the MySQL namesake database itself is really in a somewhat different product category.

You've got to wonder whether the author of that article did any homework at all.

Herbert Sitz
Friday, June 4, 2004

Postgres is the quiet achiever in open source. No marketing behind it, just a darn good RDBMS. Mysql is improving but it years of postgres.

Matthew Lock
Friday, June 4, 2004

PostGreSQL is great. What I don't like, though, is that I rarely have a choice of using it for web dev projects, given that 99% of linux-based webhosting runs MySQL and not Postgresql. Bummer.

Matt
Saturday, June 5, 2004

I think many webhosters support PostgreSQL. They just don't advertise it.

Green Pajamas
Saturday, June 5, 2004

Green PJ is correct.

A lot of hosting services do provide PostgreSQL. More typical on their higher end offerings.

The postgresql site also has a list of the bigger PG hosts.

I love PostgreSQL!

Tapiwa
Saturday, June 5, 2004

The main thing holding PostgreSQL back has obviously been the lack of a native Windows version. I thought it was supposed to have been released by now, but apparently it's still in development:
http://momjian.postgresql.org/main/writings/pgsql/project/win32.html

One company has already made available a commercial port of PostgreSQL that is Win32 native: http://www.postgresql.org/news/195.html

Until a year or two ago it seemed that MySQL and PostgreSQL were the "open source database duo", but I think Firebird's growth in popularity has now changed that to make a trio of good open source databases. Firebird seems to me like perhaps the most balanced and desirable of the three: solid Windows and Linux versions, full-featured, license not as restrictive as MySQL's GPL.

Herbert Sitz
Saturday, June 5, 2004