4 ms·

Sun and MySQL: Few Acquisitions Make This Much Sense

10 points by drm237 19y ago

thinkcomp 19y ago
When you need to ask a motivational speaker (such as Guy Kawasaki) to endorse your own billion-dollar acquisition, you know you have a problem. I love MySQL, but I'm not convinced of the headline. Remember what Sun said about and then did to Cobalt Networks...
henning 19y ago
MySQL is not the world's most popular database. Berkeley DB is, by a long shot.
- run4yourlives 19y ago
  Heh? Got some numbers? I can't even think of anyone who actually uses Berkeley DB, but can name several using myISAM or InnoDB off the top of my head.
  - ken 19y ago
    Wikipedia, of course, has a list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB#Programs_that_use_Berkeley_DB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB#Programs_that_use_B... I've heard Cisco uses it in their routers, too. Apparently 4 programs on my desktop are using it -- I had no idea. I used it at Boeing (along with a non-SQL proprietary database you've never heard of). When you've got a huge mass of (key,value) pairs you need to process, it's hard to beat Python + bdb.
  - henning 19y ago
    Postfix, Subversion, and other applications use it. It's embedded and doesn't draw attention to itself unlike a server application. There are about 200 million installs of it. Also note that probably SQLite is a more popular relational database than MySQL (it ships with every copy of OS X and every iPhone, for instance), although I don't have any data on that.
  - xirium 19y ago
    Gnome's GConf works with BerkeleyDB. Some KDE apps also use BDB. You could be a winner.
    - wheels 19y ago
      GConf uses XML by default. I don't know of any KDE apps that use BDB. RPM's database however uses BDB and MySQL used to use BDB as a storage backend.
  - bayareaguy 19y ago
    That's because the people who pay 20K to 100K USD per application to license it from Sleepycat (now Oracle) typically hide the fact they use it inside their own expensive proprietary stuff. Oracle claims 200 million deployments here - http://www.oracle.com/database/berkeley-db/index.html http://www.oracle.com/database/berkeley-db/index.html Mike Olson says Google, Amazon and Cisco all use it here - http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid39_gci1071880,00.html http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,2... Amazon SimpleDB is rumored to be Erlang + BerkeleyDB - http://chatterbox.pydinner.org/post/21675996 http://chatterbox.pydinner.org/post/21675996 Sun ran into some trouble a while back when they used it as part of their Java Desktop without the proper license. They ended up paying a few million to avoid a lawsuit and put a positive PR spin on the whole thing here: http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/16328/sun_microsystems_selects_sleepycat_software_for_new_middleware_and_desktop/ http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/16328/sun_microsyste... The lesser known (and BSD licensed) db 1.85 library still works well for a lot of applications. db 1.85 has a few bugs in the btree delete and overflow page logic which are easy to deal with. Perforce for example uses their own (fixed) fork of db 1.85 for their depot metadata.

10 points by drm237 19y ago

When you need to ask a motivational speaker (such as Guy Kawasaki) to endorse your own billion-dollar acquisition, you know you have a problem. I love MySQL, but I'm not convinced of the headline. Remember what Sun said about and then did to Cobalt Networks...

henning 19y ago

MySQL is not the world's most popular database. Berkeley DB is, by a long shot.

run4yourlives 19y ago
Heh? Got some numbers? I can't even think of anyone who actually uses Berkeley DB, but can name several using myISAM or InnoDB off the top of my head.
- ken 19y ago
  Wikipedia, of course, has a list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB#Programs_that_use_Berkeley_DB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB#Programs_that_use_B... I've heard Cisco uses it in their routers, too. Apparently 4 programs on my desktop are using it -- I had no idea. I used it at Boeing (along with a non-SQL proprietary database you've never heard of). When you've got a huge mass of (key,value) pairs you need to process, it's hard to beat Python + bdb.
- henning 19y ago
  Postfix, Subversion, and other applications use it. It's embedded and doesn't draw attention to itself unlike a server application. There are about 200 million installs of it. Also note that probably SQLite is a more popular relational database than MySQL (it ships with every copy of OS X and every iPhone, for instance), although I don't have any data on that.
- xirium 19y ago
  Gnome's GConf works with BerkeleyDB. Some KDE apps also use BDB. You could be a winner.
  - wheels 19y ago
    GConf uses XML by default. I don't know of any KDE apps that use BDB. RPM's database however uses BDB and MySQL used to use BDB as a storage backend.
- bayareaguy 19y ago
  That's because the people who pay 20K to 100K USD per application to license it from Sleepycat (now Oracle) typically hide the fact they use it inside their own expensive proprietary stuff. Oracle claims 200 million deployments here - http://www.oracle.com/database/berkeley-db/index.html http://www.oracle.com/database/berkeley-db/index.html Mike Olson says Google, Amazon and Cisco all use it here - http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid39_gci1071880,00.html http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,2... Amazon SimpleDB is rumored to be Erlang + BerkeleyDB - http://chatterbox.pydinner.org/post/21675996 http://chatterbox.pydinner.org/post/21675996 Sun ran into some trouble a while back when they used it as part of their Java Desktop without the proper license. They ended up paying a few million to avoid a lawsuit and put a positive PR spin on the whole thing here: http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/16328/sun_microsystems_selects_sleepycat_software_for_new_middleware_and_desktop/ http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/16328/sun_microsyste... The lesser known (and BSD licensed) db 1.85 library still works well for a lot of applications. db 1.85 has a few bugs in the btree delete and overflow page logic which are easy to deal with. Perforce for example uses their own (fixed) fork of db 1.85 for their depot metadata.