Effect of MySQL being acquired by Sun Micro

[howa]

any side effect for PHP?

what do you think?

[Erwin Moller]

R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah wrote:

On Jan 17, 9:24 pm, howa <howac...@gmail .comwrote:

>any side effect for PHP?

what do you think?

1. License won't change for previous GPLed MySQL versions
2. We have PostgreSQL

Excactly! :-)

I never understood how MySQL gained their huge marketshare, given the
fact that PostgreSQL was there, ready-to-use, and free for so many years.
Unless it is MySQL created a Windows version earlier than PostgreSQL
did, so new developers (who only knew how to boot into Windows) picked
MySQL.

I am a big PostgreSQL fan, and I always considered a vastly superior
database compared to MySQL. I always ask/advise my clients to use it.

About Sun: If history is a good reference, they will not screw MySQL up
more than it is already, and propably improve it a little.

Regards
Erwin Moller

3. Someone could fork GPL'ed MySQL at sourceforge

--
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[Toby A Inkster]

R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah wrote:

Gary L. Burnore <gburn...@datab asix.comwrote:

>SUN has already said it'll be open source. Perhaps you're confusing
SUN with IBM or MicroSoft?

I don't find any such reference. Do you have any URL?

Future versions will be licensed under the GPL. Don't need to quote any
sources for that -- SUN don't have any choice. One of the conditions in
the General Public Licence says that any derivative products must also be
distributed under the GPL. SUN cannot legally take MySQL and make it
proprietary without getting permission from every person who has ever made
a contribution to the current codebase, which must be *hundreds* of
independent developers.

Whatsmore, SUN would be incredibly unlikely to even *try*. Of the large
technology companies, SUN have one of the most consistently good open
source track records:

* They bought StarOffice from StarDivision and released the
source code under the GPL, starting the OpenOffice.org project
which they continue to contribute to;

* In the last couple of years, SUN have re-licenced most of
the Java platform under the GPL;

* Three years ago they open sourced most of their operating
system, Solaris, albeit not under the GPL, but their own
open source licence.

SUN are really not the bad guys!

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 19 days, 2:47.]

Ham vs Bacon vs Pork
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/01/17/pork-etc/

[Toby A Inkster]

Erwin Moller wrote:

I never understood how MySQL gained their huge marketshare, given the
fact that PostgreSQL was there, ready-to-use, and free for so many
years. Unless it is MySQL created a Windows version earlier than
PostgreSQL did, so new developers (who only knew how to boot into
Windows) picked MySQL.

The Windows version gave MySQL a big boost, but it's not only that.

Firstly, PHP and MySQL were well-integrated from an early stage. The
integration between PostgreSQL in PHP is now just as good, but it wasn't
for a while. The growths of MySQL and PHP reinforced each other.

Secondly, PostgreSQL hasn't been around *that* long. It has a history that
goes back before MySQL, sure, but before 1997 it wasn't called PostgreSQL
-- it was called Postgres. The earlier Postgres system was a relational
database system that did *not* support SQL. SQL support was slowly added
between 1994 and 1997.

By the time Postgres became PostgreSQL, mSQL already had a strong foothold
in the mid-size UNIX database market. mSQL wasn't open source, but it was
fairly entrenched. So when an open source alternative (MySQL) came along,
offering full API compatibility with mSQL, it is no surprise that it
became immediately popular.

Lastly, but not least: performance. No, MySQL is not ACID-complete, and it
still has a long way to go to catch up with PostgreSQL, but it's always
been fast. As MySQL has started adding features, it has started to slow
down a little; and recent releases of PostgreSQL have made massive speed
improvements too; so the difference is becoming negligible. But for most
simple queries, MySQL is usually still slightly faster.

MySQL achieves a lot of its speed advantages by cutting corners in data
integrity checks. (For example, even in current versions of MySQL,
configured using default settings, it is possible to record nonsense dates
such as the 30th of February.)

For complex queries, PostgreSQL tends to do better. MySQL 5 still isn't
bad. MySQL 4 and below just barf and say they don't understand the query.
If you've got shed-loads of data and you're into serious optimisation, you
can probably make PostgreSQL go faster than MySQL, because it has much
better indexing facilities.

For example, say you want to frequently do searches like this:

SELECT telephone
FROM contacts
WHERE LOWER(forename| |' '||surname) LIKE 'john do%';

(And don't get me started on MySQL's incorrect handling of the '||'
operator, and its general butchering of standard SQL syntax!) then on
PostgreSQL, you can create an index on an arbitrary expression:

CREATE INDEX fullnames
ON contacts (LOWER(forename ||' '||surname));

MySQL cannot create indexes on expressions -- only on columns.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 19 days, 4:02.]

Ham vs Bacon vs Pork
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/01/17/pork-etc/