6 ms·

Is MySQL Doomed to Extinction?

24 points by silkodyssey 16y ago

amix 16y ago
On a long enough timeline the survival rate for anything drops to zero - - and as _why put it "programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more."
ck2 16y ago
Not when the product they are talking about is query compatible with it. Kinda reminds me of how Litespeed built a httpd.conf/.htaccess compatible apache replacement - it's drop-in ready but many times faster in comparison. But it's very pricey so you won't see Apache going away anytime soon (and people also switch to nginx for free if they don't need the compatibility factor).
johna 16y ago
"Is <specific technology> doomed to die? Mr. Someone, who just started a business competing with <specific technology> says yes!"
- pg 16y ago
  To be fair, that doesn't imply that Mr. Someone is merely claiming so out of self-interest. If he started a company to compete with the technology, he must really believe it's going to die. Which means you can't simply dismiss his statements; you have to look into them and judge them on their merits. It's a bad sign for HN that this facile dismissal has (as of this writing) twice as many points as this much deeper but also critical analysis: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332039 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332039
  - matwood 16y ago
    Exactly. It's best to assume everyone is biased and judge arguments on their merit and not on who is delivering it.
  - davidw 16y ago
    It would be interesting to analyze, over time, the relative points of the first several "root" comments.
  - reitzensteinm 16y ago
    Actually, I think in the hypothetical case it would be fair to write what Mr. Someone is saying off as FUD, and ignore them, unless false negatives are of serious consequence (eg, you're an investor). Self interest aside, it's such a trollish statement that adds nothing to the real discussion, which is a) what's wrong with product x, and b) what my product y does to fix this. Such behaviour correlates reasonably strongly with incompetence, at least in my experience. My problem with the grandparent post is more that the question was actually posed by a journalist, which is night and day different. They're sexing up the content to sell a story. So reframing the quote as being from the Clustrix guys is quite dishonest. Had the quote actually been theirs, I'd have no problem laughing at their expense, although I realise such behaviour is not encouraged here.
  - elblanco 16y ago
    I've found that these types of comments make for easy karma. The longer, more thoughtful ones make for significantly less.
mdasen 16y ago
The problem with this new product is that their business model seems to be selling the software with hardware and there are no indications that the software is open source. As such, it's really more a competitor for other proprietary products since their pricing starts in the $100,000 range. I know that it's become fashionable to write of MySQL or SQL in general and many large sites are migrating away from it to non-relational data stores. However, for many sites, MySQL does a wonderful job and relational features cut down development time. The founder of Flickr spoke to this at a Django conference saying something to the effect of, "ever since there was more than 200 sites on the internet, it has been better to target a framework at the rest of the internet than at the top 100 sites". Specifically, he was speaking to sharding and other highly scalable techniques that Django doesn't deal with natively and saying that the vast, vast majority of sites will never have to deal with those questions. Relational technology definitely has its place and does offer developers advantages. And relational technology does scale for some high-traffic operations. Look at Wikipedia. It's the 6th most trafficked site in the world and backed by MySQL. Granted, they do use caching and other techniques as well, but it's a highly available, highly trafficked site. In fact, I can't remember the last time I heard about Wikipedia going down. New technology directions are great. I'm really excited about Cassandra. Do we really have to declare something dead and something else the winner?
njharman 16y ago
That writing style was so annoying I could not finish article.
- jkmcf 16y ago
  I love news outlets that don't include a single link to any of the company websites they mention. (Yes, guessing clustrix.com was pretty easy.)
spudlyo 16y ago
It's going to take a lot more than an expensive, closed source, hardware integrated, clustered database that talks the MySQL protocol to even make even a tiny dent in MySQL's popularity. Outrageous headline used to draw people in to an annoying article that reads like marketing copy.
- mcav 16y ago
  It's going to take ... Postgresql.
  - mmt 16y ago
    ..an oft-overlooked option, sadly That and cheaper hardware used more intelligently. Even more sadly,I have found these topics, RDBMSes and hardware, to be areas of great ignorance and, perhaps therefore, fear among software folk. More importantly, it will probably take a substantial effort to de-mystify these two.
  - spudlyo 16y ago
    Built in replication is a big step towards that goal. Healthy competition between open source databases is good for everyone.
jcnnghm 16y ago
Oracle has been extremely hostile to former sun customers. I can't even download firmware now without buying service contracts for all my servers. If they won't even provide proper service to hardware customers, I think they will be downright hostile to a competing bread and butter product that they now control.
Shorel 16y ago
This particular product not only can not doom MySQL, but it actually requires MySQL success in order to have customers. Only PostgreSQL or a similar more featured database can doom MySQL, and I don't see this happening soon. In fact, this product even strenghts MySQL in the market, by making it scale up for enterprise customers.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
rbanffy 16y ago
Sure it is. So is everything we run on our computers, as well as the computers themselves. We don't run dBase II on CP/M anymore. The same way msql was replaced by MySQL, MySQL will be replaced by superior software at some point of the future. Just don't bet on these guys. And, BTW, isn't this the Maureen O'Gara that wrote that "exposé" about Groklaw?
- mcantelon 16y ago
  Yeah, Sys-Con are a sketchy company. http://aralbalkan.com/2022 http://aralbalkan.com/2022
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Three banners stood out. One very annoying from Microsoft, two other banners from them and one, smaller, from Oracle. I wasn't going to buy anything Microsoft for the foreseeable future. Oracle got one more penalty on my book.
varjag 16y ago
Well I'll tell you what deserves to die: that website with popup ad so huge that its close button is out of bounds of netbook screen. Text obstructed; didn't read.
goldham 16y ago
I tried to read this article but gave up because the pop-up ad took up my entire iPhone screen and scrolled when I tried to get to the 'close this window' link. Anyone have a quick work-around for this?
elblanco 16y ago
Yes. At least in my own company. We were picking a vendor and had gone deep in talks with the MySQL folks to license their technology, and then Oracle stepped in and we picked somebody else. Following the technology since then, it's clear that Oracle doesn't really know what to do with this thing. I think it would be a mistake right now for any company to pick MySQL for any major work without plans on moving it out of their product at some point in the future, it's simply on far too unstable ground as a database to rely on anymore.

24 points by silkodyssey 16y ago

amix 16y ago

On a long enough timeline the survival rate for anything drops to zero - - and as _why put it "programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more."

ck2 16y ago

Not when the product they are talking about is query compatible with it. Kinda reminds me of how Litespeed built a httpd.conf/.htaccess compatible apache replacement - it's drop-in ready but many times faster in comparison. But it's very pricey so you won't see Apache going away anytime soon (and people also switch to nginx for free if they don't need the compatibility factor).

johna 16y ago

"Is <specific technology> doomed to die? Mr. Someone, who just started a business competing with <specific technology> says yes!"

pg 16y ago
To be fair, that doesn't imply that Mr. Someone is merely claiming so out of self-interest. If he started a company to compete with the technology, he must really believe it's going to die. Which means you can't simply dismiss his statements; you have to look into them and judge them on their merits. It's a bad sign for HN that this facile dismissal has (as of this writing) twice as many points as this much deeper but also critical analysis: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332039 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332039
- matwood 16y ago
  Exactly. It's best to assume everyone is biased and judge arguments on their merit and not on who is delivering it.
- davidw 16y ago
  It would be interesting to analyze, over time, the relative points of the first several "root" comments.
- reitzensteinm 16y ago
  Actually, I think in the hypothetical case it would be fair to write what Mr. Someone is saying off as FUD, and ignore them, unless false negatives are of serious consequence (eg, you're an investor). Self interest aside, it's such a trollish statement that adds nothing to the real discussion, which is a) what's wrong with product x, and b) what my product y does to fix this. Such behaviour correlates reasonably strongly with incompetence, at least in my experience. My problem with the grandparent post is more that the question was actually posed by a journalist, which is night and day different. They're sexing up the content to sell a story. So reframing the quote as being from the Clustrix guys is quite dishonest. Had the quote actually been theirs, I'd have no problem laughing at their expense, although I realise such behaviour is not encouraged here.
- elblanco 16y ago
  I've found that these types of comments make for easy karma. The longer, more thoughtful ones make for significantly less.

mdasen 16y ago

The problem with this new product is that their business model seems to be selling the software with hardware and there are no indications that the software is open source. As such, it's really more a competitor for other proprietary products since their pricing starts in the $100,000 range. I know that it's become fashionable to write of MySQL or SQL in general and many large sites are migrating away from it to non-relational data stores. However, for many sites, MySQL does a wonderful job and relational features cut down development time. The founder of Flickr spoke to this at a Django conference saying something to the effect of, "ever since there was more than 200 sites on the internet, it has been better to target a framework at the rest of the internet than at the top 100 sites". Specifically, he was speaking to sharding and other highly scalable techniques that Django doesn't deal with natively and saying that the vast, vast majority of sites will never have to deal with those questions. Relational technology definitely has its place and does offer developers advantages. And relational technology does scale for some high-traffic operations. Look at Wikipedia. It's the 6th most trafficked site in the world and backed by MySQL. Granted, they do use caching and other techniques as well, but it's a highly available, highly trafficked site. In fact, I can't remember the last time I heard about Wikipedia going down. New technology directions are great. I'm really excited about Cassandra. Do we really have to declare something dead and something else the winner?

njharman 16y ago

That writing style was so annoying I could not finish article.

jkmcf 16y ago
I love news outlets that don't include a single link to any of the company websites they mention. (Yes, guessing clustrix.com was pretty easy.)

spudlyo 16y ago

It's going to take a lot more than an expensive, closed source, hardware integrated, clustered database that talks the MySQL protocol to even make even a tiny dent in MySQL's popularity. Outrageous headline used to draw people in to an annoying article that reads like marketing copy.

mcav 16y ago
It's going to take ... Postgresql.
- mmt 16y ago
  ..an oft-overlooked option, sadly That and cheaper hardware used more intelligently. Even more sadly,I have found these topics, RDBMSes and hardware, to be areas of great ignorance and, perhaps therefore, fear among software folk. More importantly, it will probably take a substantial effort to de-mystify these two.
- spudlyo 16y ago
  Built in replication is a big step towards that goal. Healthy competition between open source databases is good for everyone.

jcnnghm 16y ago

Oracle has been extremely hostile to former sun customers. I can't even download firmware now without buying service contracts for all my servers. If they won't even provide proper service to hardware customers, I think they will be downright hostile to a competing bread and butter product that they now control.

Shorel 16y ago

This particular product not only can not doom MySQL, but it actually requires MySQL success in order to have customers. Only PostgreSQL or a similar more featured database can doom MySQL, and I don't see this happening soon. In fact, this product even strenghts MySQL in the market, by making it scale up for enterprise customers.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

rbanffy 16y ago

Sure it is. So is everything we run on our computers, as well as the computers themselves. We don't run dBase II on CP/M anymore. The same way msql was replaced by MySQL, MySQL will be replaced by superior software at some point of the future. Just don't bet on these guys. And, BTW, isn't this the Maureen O'Gara that wrote that "exposé" about Groklaw?

mcantelon 16y ago
Yeah, Sys-Con are a sketchy company. http://aralbalkan.com/2022 http://aralbalkan.com/2022
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Three banners stood out. One very annoying from Microsoft, two other banners from them and one, smaller, from Oracle. I wasn't going to buy anything Microsoft for the foreseeable future. Oracle got one more penalty on my book.

varjag 16y ago

Well I'll tell you what deserves to die: that website with popup ad so huge that its close button is out of bounds of netbook screen. Text obstructed; didn't read.

goldham 16y ago

I tried to read this article but gave up because the pop-up ad took up my entire iPhone screen and scrolled when I tried to get to the 'close this window' link. Anyone have a quick work-around for this?

elblanco 16y ago

Yes. At least in my own company. We were picking a vendor and had gone deep in talks with the MySQL folks to license their technology, and then Oracle stepped in and we picked somebody else. Following the technology since then, it's clear that Oracle doesn't really know what to do with this thing. I think it would be a mistake right now for any company to pick MySQL for any major work without plans on moving it out of their product at some point in the future, it's simply on far too unstable ground as a database to rely on anymore.