7 ms·

European Investment Bank announces €25M funding for MariaDB

117 points by hpaavola 9y ago

shimon_e 9y ago
I've seen multiple open source projects get such government funding. Does anyone know the process that they go through to get such grants?
- mkesper 9y ago
  For this program, look here: http://www.eib.org/efsi/how-does-a-project-get-efsi-financing/index.htm# http://www.eib.org/efsi/how-does-a-project-get-efsi-financin... There's also a map of funded projects (most not software projects, as far as I can see): http://www.eib.org/efsi/map/index.htm http://www.eib.org/efsi/map/index.htm
- gotchange 9y ago
  It's a loan agreement not a grant.
mathnode 9y ago
Good for mariadb and a good eye opener for any EU government system that is stuck on oracle. Mariadb 10.3 is going to be a haven (or rehab) for oracle veterans. https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/what-is-mariadb-103/#compatibility https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/what-is-mariadb-103/#compa...
- sz4kerto 9y ago
  > stuck on oracle. What is the problem with Oracle except the price? edit: sorry, I mean the DB, not the company.
  - espadrine 9y ago
    Its behavior towards open-source software has been chaotic, sometimes birthing great projects (eg. btrfs, which wasn't even a great fit for their database systems), sometimes strangling them slowly (eg. OpenOffice). Overall, its relationship with external contributors has been awkward.
    - threeseed 9y ago
      Not sure what that has to do with anything. Companies aren't interested in how altruistic their vendor is. They care if their product works and is supported. Also many of Oracle's customers aren't exactly strangers to aggressive tactics in the marketplace.
  - erhardm 9y ago
    "...shit mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers and make a whole shitload of money..."[0] 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2147 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2147
    - sz4kerto 9y ago
      I meant the database, not the company.
      - erhardm 9y ago
        By using the DB you have to deal with the company. By giving a grant to a company that is (apparently) more ethical will signal what kind of behavior you encourage, hence choosing to work with MariaDB over OracleDB.
        sz4kerto 9y ago
        Well, OK, but e.g. REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW ON COMMIT might be more valuable to you than working with a more ethical company. YMMV, of course.
    - scriptproof 9y ago
      And also send letter to FCC to encourage repeal Net Neutrality, try to make use of API copyrightable, try to steal Android revenues from Google with debatable reasons, and so ones... That is for the company in general, but for the customers of their database, there is also much to say.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    It's all about the price. The database is largely irrelevant. I have been involved in a dozen or so Hadoop deployments now and almost all of them are there not because it will allow them to do amazing new things but because the licenses for Teradata or Oracle were too expensive. So they have a giant "data lake" aka "dumping ground" on HDFS and keep just the mission critical data in the EDW.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
      Out of curiosity, did all of those clients use CDH (Cloudera Hadoop)? They're pretty much becoming a hegemony in their own right like DataStax and Cassandra
      - coredog64 9y ago
        We run both CDH and Cassandra at my employer. DataStax made a play, but they were Oracle level expensive, so we stuck with OSS. CDH provides benefits in the early days, but at this point it feels more constraining. Their release cadence is slow, so we're stuck writing long term workarounds for bugs that we're fixed two years ago in the upstream project. The stuff that they are working on is half-baked and doesn't support what would seem to be trivial use cases. I wouldn't be surprised if their ecosystem calcifies now that they are public.
        smueller1234 9y ago
        We had a similar experience and walked away very early on. Now run >1k node clusters without outside consulting.
      - threeseed 9y ago
        Bit late to reply but it was a mix of the big two. Cloudera and Hortonworks. And I wouldn't say Cloudera is dominating Hadoop.
    - koolba 9y ago
      Without proper planning, most data lakes end up as the digital equivalent of a super fund site.
  - mathnode 9y ago
    Lots of RBDMS's have their issues or drawbacks, none like Oracle DB. The only RDBMS where you actually have to throw cash at it to solve a problem like scale or backups. The Oracle RDBMS is absolutely terrible. You'd have to be absolutely mad to use it, even if it was free. In all my years I have never met anyone ever that chose it for it's technical merit, especially from people whom have knowledge of more than one RDBMS. Whatever it's got, another RDBMS's do it properly, and (usually) for a lot less money. Pick a feature, any feature they advertise and will most likely be from a product they acquired, or half-arsed themselves. I am not at all convinced any oracle engineer knows about fsync(). EDIT: PL/SQL is not a feature. It's a punishment.
- thorin 9y ago
  Can you clarify this? The reason Oracle is so prevalent is that many companies have millions of lines of code in pl/sql, may use many proprietry Oracle features which until recently weren't implemented in SQLServer or Postgres. There's also the aggressive license thing and the issue of moving a complex realtime financial system. I've spent years working on large scale Oracle/other db systems for banks and utilities, so interested to hear the story behind this...
  - michielr 9y ago
    When running with sql_mode=ORACLE, the server now understands a subset of Oracle's PL/SQL language instead of the traditional MariaDB syntax for stored routines. See MDEV-10142, MDEV-10764 and MariaDB-10.3.0 release notes to know the current status. So after the update you can use a (subset) of pl/sql.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
      Nice. This really is a shot at Oracle's hegemony when it comes to enterprise databases. Has anyone here done a migration from Oracle's offering to MariaDB? How difficult was it?
    - thorin 9y ago
      That's what I was expecting to see but I couldn't find in your post. Thanks for the clarification. Would be good to see a similar mode in postgres as I know pgsql is close, transpilation makes stored procs cool!
- pjmlp 9y ago
  There are lots of features that open source databases still don't have. How well does Maria DB handle distributed transactions across the database cluster? Or how does Maria DB handle object based schemas? What about the stored procedures language features versus PL/SQL? Don't get me wrong, it is great that Maria DB is getting lots of money so that their developers can improve it, but there are lots of database features that keep us on Oracle and SQL Server, specially when we only care about business value and not FOSS religious discussions.
  - scriptproof 9y ago
    Distributed transactions: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/xa-transactions/ https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/xa-transactions/ Stored procedures: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/stored-procedures/ https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/stored-procedures/
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      What about support at the driver level for Java and .NET applications or heterogeneous database schemas? It is not clear how "XA START" maps into each server. Am I supposed to manually mess around with text ids? Nice to see stored procedures are supported, but they seem pretty basic in language features when compared with PL/SQL or Transact SQL.
      - crypto5 9y ago
        > What about support at the driver level for Java and .NET applications or heterogeneous database schemas? I guess MariaDB JDBC driver already has two phase commit logic, because MySql has it for decade. It is enough for distributed transactions in "heterogeneous database schemas".
tosh 9y ago
Would love to see this for Datomic.
- oblio 9y ago
  The EIB invests in EU projects or in developing countries. Datomic/Cognitect seems to be based on the East Coast, so it doesn't seem like EIB investment material. It does look like VC material, though :)
frik 9y ago
> There are lots of features that open source databases still don't have. Not true. All of the things you mentioned are available for MySQL, MariaDB and/or Postgres. You clearly should do your research first.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Maybe you should research what enterprise RDMS are capable of as well, specially in clustering, data integrity and OLAP analysis tools.
  - frik 9y ago
    You come from the high horse with wrong accusations.. > There are lots of features that open source databases still don't have. ..that shed open source databases in bad light. Why? Are you related to MSSQL or Oracle DB in some way? If not, which feature do you actually need and miss from MySQL, MariaDB or Postgres?? Please name it. Suggest it to MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres - they have open bugtrackers. MySQL and MariaDB have a very good clustering support. It's very well known for that. Many companies use it at web-scale in such scenarios. MySQL, MariaDB and Postgres have data integrity the same level as Oracle and MSSQL and DB2. This is 2017, not 1990. If you need advanced XML, Java and what not SQL2003 support, have a look at Postgres, it's basically a open source Oracle with it's goal originally to clone the PL/SQL language.
- dang 9y ago
  > You clearly should do your research first. Personal swipes are not welcome on Hacker News. This kind of thing degrades discussions rapidly, so please edit it out of your posts here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14290895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14290895 and marked it off-topic.
davidgerard 9y ago
The actual press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/katainen/announcements/investment-plan-europe-eur-25-million-support-mariadbs-development-new-software_en https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/kata...
- sctb 9y ago
  Thanks, we updated the link from http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEX-17-1244_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEX-17-1244_en.htm a little while ago.
gotchange 9y ago
Slightly off-topic, what caught my attention was how the firm developing MariaDB is Finnish while one of the top leadership* who approved the agreement is Finnish too. *: European Commission Vice-President Jyrki Katainen, responsible for Jobs, Growth, Investment and Competitiveness
- ptman 9y ago
  That's exactly the kind of corruption we have in "the least corrupted country in the world" (maybe not this year, but pretty close). No money changes hands, but if you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. It's all about who you know
  - gotchange 9y ago
    I am not saying anything but this looks like good old "pork barrel politics" to me.
- pwtweet 9y ago
  There are 54 representatives from member countries that decide the funding allocation. This funding was directed at the Digital sectors in the Nordic countries; Denmark, Finland and Sweden.
roel_v 9y ago
What are the terms of such a loan? Has anyone reading this bothered to look deeper?
Arwill 9y ago
I'm wondering what will prevent that open source project from being sold (like MySQL was)? The prospect of having a stable open source database engine is nice, but then it gets sold to a big corporation (Oracle in case of MySQL), and gets killed off (presumable to push paying customers towards their own DB). The original developers leave the project, development and maintenance stalls, and whoever was using the DB freely, now has to transition to something else. So now MariaDB gets this funding, they might just as well work on the product for couple of years, build up user and paying customer base, and then sell it off. If i were giving grants as a government entity, i would consider adding a condition to the deal that they can't sell the software and have to keep it open-source and free.
- mdcallag 9y ago
  MySQL has done great since Oracle acquired Sun -- regular & high-quality releases, new features, tech debt reduction.

117 points by hpaavola 9y ago

I've seen multiple open source projects get such government funding. Does anyone know the process that they go through to get such grants?

mkesper 9y ago
For this program, look here: http://www.eib.org/efsi/how-does-a-project-get-efsi-financing/index.htm# http://www.eib.org/efsi/how-does-a-project-get-efsi-financin... There's also a map of funded projects (most not software projects, as far as I can see): http://www.eib.org/efsi/map/index.htm http://www.eib.org/efsi/map/index.htm
gotchange 9y ago
It's a loan agreement not a grant.

mathnode 9y ago

Good for mariadb and a good eye opener for any EU government system that is stuck on oracle. Mariadb 10.3 is going to be a haven (or rehab) for oracle veterans. https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/what-is-mariadb-103/#compatibility https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/what-is-mariadb-103/#compa...

sz4kerto 9y ago
> stuck on oracle. What is the problem with Oracle except the price? edit: sorry, I mean the DB, not the company.
- espadrine 9y ago
  Its behavior towards open-source software has been chaotic, sometimes birthing great projects (eg. btrfs, which wasn't even a great fit for their database systems), sometimes strangling them slowly (eg. OpenOffice). Overall, its relationship with external contributors has been awkward.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    Not sure what that has to do with anything. Companies aren't interested in how altruistic their vendor is. They care if their product works and is supported. Also many of Oracle's customers aren't exactly strangers to aggressive tactics in the marketplace.
- erhardm 9y ago
  "...shit mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers and make a whole shitload of money..."[0] 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2147 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2147
  - sz4kerto 9y ago
    I meant the database, not the company.
    - erhardm 9y ago
      By using the DB you have to deal with the company. By giving a grant to a company that is (apparently) more ethical will signal what kind of behavior you encourage, hence choosing to work with MariaDB over OracleDB.
      - sz4kerto 9y ago
        Well, OK, but e.g. REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW ON COMMIT might be more valuable to you than working with a more ethical company. YMMV, of course.
  - scriptproof 9y ago
    And also send letter to FCC to encourage repeal Net Neutrality, try to make use of API copyrightable, try to steal Android revenues from Google with debatable reasons, and so ones... That is for the company in general, but for the customers of their database, there is also much to say.
- threeseed 9y ago
  It's all about the price. The database is largely irrelevant. I have been involved in a dozen or so Hadoop deployments now and almost all of them are there not because it will allow them to do amazing new things but because the licenses for Teradata or Oracle were too expensive. So they have a giant "data lake" aka "dumping ground" on HDFS and keep just the mission critical data in the EDW.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    Out of curiosity, did all of those clients use CDH (Cloudera Hadoop)? They're pretty much becoming a hegemony in their own right like DataStax and Cassandra
    - coredog64 9y ago
      We run both CDH and Cassandra at my employer. DataStax made a play, but they were Oracle level expensive, so we stuck with OSS. CDH provides benefits in the early days, but at this point it feels more constraining. Their release cadence is slow, so we're stuck writing long term workarounds for bugs that we're fixed two years ago in the upstream project. The stuff that they are working on is half-baked and doesn't support what would seem to be trivial use cases. I wouldn't be surprised if their ecosystem calcifies now that they are public.
      - smueller1234 9y ago
        We had a similar experience and walked away very early on. Now run >1k node clusters without outside consulting.
    - threeseed 9y ago
      Bit late to reply but it was a mix of the big two. Cloudera and Hortonworks. And I wouldn't say Cloudera is dominating Hadoop.
  - koolba 9y ago
    Without proper planning, most data lakes end up as the digital equivalent of a super fund site.
- mathnode 9y ago
  Lots of RBDMS's have their issues or drawbacks, none like Oracle DB. The only RDBMS where you actually have to throw cash at it to solve a problem like scale or backups. The Oracle RDBMS is absolutely terrible. You'd have to be absolutely mad to use it, even if it was free. In all my years I have never met anyone ever that chose it for it's technical merit, especially from people whom have knowledge of more than one RDBMS. Whatever it's got, another RDBMS's do it properly, and (usually) for a lot less money. Pick a feature, any feature they advertise and will most likely be from a product they acquired, or half-arsed themselves. I am not at all convinced any oracle engineer knows about fsync(). EDIT: PL/SQL is not a feature. It's a punishment.
thorin 9y ago
Can you clarify this? The reason Oracle is so prevalent is that many companies have millions of lines of code in pl/sql, may use many proprietry Oracle features which until recently weren't implemented in SQLServer or Postgres. There's also the aggressive license thing and the issue of moving a complex realtime financial system. I've spent years working on large scale Oracle/other db systems for banks and utilities, so interested to hear the story behind this...
- michielr 9y ago
  When running with sql_mode=ORACLE, the server now understands a subset of Oracle's PL/SQL language instead of the traditional MariaDB syntax for stored routines. See MDEV-10142, MDEV-10764 and MariaDB-10.3.0 release notes to know the current status. So after the update you can use a (subset) of pl/sql.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    Nice. This really is a shot at Oracle's hegemony when it comes to enterprise databases. Has anyone here done a migration from Oracle's offering to MariaDB? How difficult was it?
  - thorin 9y ago
    That's what I was expecting to see but I couldn't find in your post. Thanks for the clarification. Would be good to see a similar mode in postgres as I know pgsql is close, transpilation makes stored procs cool!
pjmlp 9y ago
There are lots of features that open source databases still don't have. How well does Maria DB handle distributed transactions across the database cluster? Or how does Maria DB handle object based schemas? What about the stored procedures language features versus PL/SQL? Don't get me wrong, it is great that Maria DB is getting lots of money so that their developers can improve it, but there are lots of database features that keep us on Oracle and SQL Server, specially when we only care about business value and not FOSS religious discussions.
- scriptproof 9y ago
  Distributed transactions: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/xa-transactions/ https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/xa-transactions/ Stored procedures: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/stored-procedures/ https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/stored-procedures/
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    What about support at the driver level for Java and .NET applications or heterogeneous database schemas? It is not clear how "XA START" maps into each server. Am I supposed to manually mess around with text ids? Nice to see stored procedures are supported, but they seem pretty basic in language features when compared with PL/SQL or Transact SQL.
    - crypto5 9y ago
      > What about support at the driver level for Java and .NET applications or heterogeneous database schemas? I guess MariaDB JDBC driver already has two phase commit logic, because MySql has it for decade. It is enough for distributed transactions in "heterogeneous database schemas".

tosh 9y ago

Would love to see this for Datomic.

oblio 9y ago
The EIB invests in EU projects or in developing countries. Datomic/Cognitect seems to be based on the East Coast, so it doesn't seem like EIB investment material. It does look like VC material, though :)

frik 9y ago

> There are lots of features that open source databases still don't have. Not true. All of the things you mentioned are available for MySQL, MariaDB and/or Postgres. You clearly should do your research first.

pjmlp 9y ago
Maybe you should research what enterprise RDMS are capable of as well, specially in clustering, data integrity and OLAP analysis tools.
- frik 9y ago
  You come from the high horse with wrong accusations.. > There are lots of features that open source databases still don't have. ..that shed open source databases in bad light. Why? Are you related to MSSQL or Oracle DB in some way? If not, which feature do you actually need and miss from MySQL, MariaDB or Postgres?? Please name it. Suggest it to MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres - they have open bugtrackers. MySQL and MariaDB have a very good clustering support. It's very well known for that. Many companies use it at web-scale in such scenarios. MySQL, MariaDB and Postgres have data integrity the same level as Oracle and MSSQL and DB2. This is 2017, not 1990. If you need advanced XML, Java and what not SQL2003 support, have a look at Postgres, it's basically a open source Oracle with it's goal originally to clone the PL/SQL language.
dang 9y ago
> You clearly should do your research first. Personal swipes are not welcome on Hacker News. This kind of thing degrades discussions rapidly, so please edit it out of your posts here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14290895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14290895 and marked it off-topic.

davidgerard 9y ago

The actual press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/katainen/announcements/investment-plan-europe-eur-25-million-support-mariadbs-development-new-software_en https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/kata...

sctb 9y ago
Thanks, we updated the link from http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEX-17-1244_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEX-17-1244_en.htm a little while ago.

gotchange 9y ago

Slightly off-topic, what caught my attention was how the firm developing MariaDB is Finnish while one of the top leadership* who approved the agreement is Finnish too. *: European Commission Vice-President Jyrki Katainen, responsible for Jobs, Growth, Investment and Competitiveness

ptman 9y ago
That's exactly the kind of corruption we have in "the least corrupted country in the world" (maybe not this year, but pretty close). No money changes hands, but if you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. It's all about who you know
- gotchange 9y ago
  I am not saying anything but this looks like good old "pork barrel politics" to me.
pwtweet 9y ago
There are 54 representatives from member countries that decide the funding allocation. This funding was directed at the Digital sectors in the Nordic countries; Denmark, Finland and Sweden.

roel_v 9y ago

What are the terms of such a loan? Has anyone reading this bothered to look deeper?

Arwill 9y ago

I'm wondering what will prevent that open source project from being sold (like MySQL was)? The prospect of having a stable open source database engine is nice, but then it gets sold to a big corporation (Oracle in case of MySQL), and gets killed off (presumable to push paying customers towards their own DB). The original developers leave the project, development and maintenance stalls, and whoever was using the DB freely, now has to transition to something else. So now MariaDB gets this funding, they might just as well work on the product for couple of years, build up user and paying customer base, and then sell it off. If i were giving grants as a government entity, i would consider adding a condition to the deal that they can't sell the software and have to keep it open-source and free.

mdcallag 9y ago
MySQL has done great since Oracle acquired Sun -- regular & high-quality releases, new features, tech debt reduction.