13 ms·

RIP Open Source MySQL

169 points by mariuz 14y ago

scottlinux 14y ago
Check out this GPLv2 fork / alternative mentioned: http://mariadb.org http://mariadb.org
- mikescar 14y ago
  Also, Percona rocks. XtraDB is just a drop-in replacement for InnoDB. http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server
- ecaron 14y ago
  We're using MariaDB at linkup.com and love it! Whenever I read "MySQL is becoming closed source" I think its just an indication that MariaDB needs more community interaction (like how the Fedora team ramped up marketing efforts when RedHat killed their non-RHEL distro.)
- whalesalad 14y ago
  When I got my new Macbook Air I decided to give mariadb a try locally instead of mysql. So far so good! 'brew install mariadb' and you're off to the races. It's 100% binary compatible, as far as I know. So far working great with some local wordpress/php apps as well as older django apps. I'm migrating slowly but surely to PostgreSQL though.
beedogs 14y ago
As soon as Oracle bought them, the writing was on the wall for an open-source MySQL. Look how quickly they murdered OpenSolaris. Oracle is anathema to open software.
- taligent 14y ago
  OpenSolaris is still available for download including the source. http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/ http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/ It's just not supported or maintained any longer.
  - 3amOpsGuy 14y ago
    I miss Sun. They made some seriously cool stuff, and in their later years they were really quite progressive in their outlook and approach. Jonathan Schwartz, for me anyway, kicked off the whole cool, open and chatty top exec thing that's so common now.
    - jmj42 14y ago
      > in their later years they were really quite progressive in their outlook and approach. This is a common misconception about Sun. In fact, they were quite progressive from the beginning. They embraced a hybrid open/closed model from day one, for instance. They opened up some key technologies, such as NFS and SPARC. They maintained huge, comparatively, research budgets, with relatively few strings attached to productization of that research. Through the late 90s and very early '00 (Dotcom era) they were under constant pressure from institutional investors to cut research funding, but didn't. In the end, though, I have to agre. I miss Sun (though my friends and co-workers probably do not miss me talking about how great Sun is) [edit: cut-n-paste quote error]
    - batista 14y ago
      >I miss Sun. They made some seriously cool stuff, and in their later years they were really quite progressive in their outlook and approach. Yes, and look how well it worked out for them...
      - _delirium 14y ago
        One of the problems with corporate R&D in general it seems: what's successful for businesses and what's good for technological advancement often seem not to be in sync. Some of the best stuff has come from notoriously unprofitable groups, like the old Xerox PARC, which benefitted the whole sector, but not its originators.
        russell 14y ago
        Unlike most corporate R&D, PARC did good stuff. It was Xerox HQ that was exceptionally stupid. They had all the technology, but managed to do very little with it. Silicon Valley companies picked it up and ran with it.
- metachris 14y ago
  Also same story with OpenOffice, and Jenkins/Hudson.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  The writing has been on the wall ever since MySQL AB required copyright assignment. Monty doesn't come to this with clean hands.
  - mrkurt 14y ago
    Copyright assignment is basically required if you're going to sell an open source project under a different license. It's not usually nefarious, all that contributed code is still available under GPL.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      The point is that if one entity owns the original copyright, they can wreak sufficient havoc that the project can splinter into individually anaemic forks. MySQL has splintered into at least 3 competing forks outside of the "real" MySQL: MariaDB, Percona and Drizzle.
      - fallenpegasus 14y ago
        I wouldn't say they "compete", at least, not harmfully. Maria and Percona swap patches with each other, and are drop-in replacements for MySQL. Drizzle is an exploration of the idea of paying off as much as possible of MySQL's technical debt and throwing away crufty backwards compatibility. The technical ecology of users and developers around MySQL is healthier than it has ever been.
    - davidw 14y ago
      > going to sell an open source project under a different license It's required where you want to sell a restrictively licensed (GPL, say) open source project under a commercial license. If it's licensed under something like the Apache license or BSD, you can do what you want with it. But then, so can everyone else, so you don't have the advantage you would with the dual license and require copyright assignment strategy.
      - rbanffy 14y ago
amouat 14y ago
HN just repeated slashdot? I don't remember that happening before...
- Bill_Dimm 14y ago
  Proof that time is now flowing backwards!
  - HorizonXP 14y ago
    Indeed! You should see time flowing backwards in this YouTube video at this timecode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=LLjUp4g-9BFlW78BBJ-lVqRg&v=Y_9vd4HWlVA&feature=player_detailpage#t=545s http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=LLjUp4g-9BFlW78BBJ-lVqRg&#... Seriously, watch it. Very cool.
- re_todd 14y ago
  It's usually done in a more subtle, indirect way.
- wglb 14y ago
  Seems better if the underlying article is linked, rather than the slashdot blurb.
falcolas 14y ago
FWIW, in addition to MariaDB, there is Percona Server as well, and they are also maintaining a launchpad for the base MySQL code on Launchpad while Oracle neglects that codebase. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/08/16/where-to-get-a-bzr-tree-of-the-latest-mysql-releases/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/08/16/where-to-get-...
- caseyf 14y ago
  I highly recommend Percona Server. especially if you are using SSDs or a mix of SSDs and regular disks.
  - __Joker 14y ago
    Can you elaborate ?
    - heretohelp 14y ago
      Percona has done a lot of work to enable MySQL to take advantage of SSDs, work that hasn't percolated into mainline or MariaDB.
      - latimer 14y ago
        I've benchmarked all three and it seemed like the vast majority of the performance improvement on SSDs was due to the XtraDB engine which is included with MariaDB.
        heretohelp 14y ago
        coughs http://www.percona.com/software/percona-xtradb/ http://www.percona.com/software/percona-xtradb/
        latimer 14y ago
        Yes you have to install it separately for MySQL but it's enabled by default in MariaDB so their work has in fact made it into MariaDB.
jedberg 14y ago
This is an excellent opportunity for the Postgres community to step up an promote Postgres.
- rbanffy 14y ago
  I think this would be a mistake. This is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate that anyone can fork the MySQL codebase and create other plug-in replacement databases with it, such as MariaDB and Drizzle. All that is lost is the MySQL name and brand. PostgreSQL users and developers must seize the opportunity to show businesses that free software cannot be killed, not even by mighty Oracle. They and, most notably, Microsoft, have been trying to kill it for more than a decade now. Because the anti-free-software FUD machine (fed in part by Oracle itself) is already having a wonderful time with this.
  - Udo 14y ago
    I wish I could mod this up a hundred times. PostgreSQL people themselves have been playing into the hands of corporate FUDders with their incessant and inappropriate peddling. MySQL is not your enemy, MS SQL Server is. Oracle's software empire as a whole certainly is your enemy. Show some solidarity with a fellow open source project! MySQL and PostgreSQL represent two very different implementation philosophies, and being able to choose between them according to taste and merits is a good thing. Most of us have suspected that the MySQL project itself was going to die as it was acquired by Oracle, in the same way Open Office died when it was acquired by Oracle. This is a company where good software goes to expire, either due to a deliberate intention or gross incompetence I can't say but I suspect it's a mixture of both. However sad that may be for the MySQL (or OpenOffice) brand name, the code itself lives on and continues to evolve within a rich open source ecosystem. Hence, sensational and petulant "RIP $PRODUCTNAME" articles are unnecessary. There is no threat to existing projects based on MySQL or any other successful open source project for that matter. Not only will this stuff be free forever, it will also continue to grow and be developed on its own. The corporate assassination of open source projects will only work if we let it, it's a purely psychological game.
    - 14y ago
xd 14y ago
"MySQL is dead, long live MariaDB" .. would have been a better headline. Mainly because very few MySQL users seem to be aware of MariaDB.
- spudlyo 14y ago
  Exactly. This controversy was both discovered and promoted by Monty, who has much to gain by the rejection of Oracle's brand of MySQL and the promotion of MariaDB. Having said that, I agree that this is a dick move by Oracle. It reminds me of when RedHat started shipping their kernel as one big source tarball, without patches, which undoubtedly pissed off both Oracle and the CentOS folks. Maybe they're taking a page from the RedHat playbook.
- latimer 14y ago
  Forgive my ignorance, but doesn't this harm MySQL forks as well? Since the test cases are unavailable from now on, say for example they wanted to reimplement a certain feature, isn't it much harder for them to validate that their implementation works correctly?
xxiao 14y ago
I switched to postgresql _fully_ since about half year ago, never looked back.
Groxx 14y ago
Is anyone actually surprised by this? Personally, I declared MySQL doomed (if not immediately dead) as soon as Oracle took over. I know this isn't proof of its death, but really. This was a long time coming.
nicthu 14y ago
Why are (some of?) the open source SQL-compatible RDBMS so different that you can't wake up any Monday and decide to use another one, so then proceed to unload all your data from your old one, load it into your new one, and proceed on your merry way? In other words, why should I have to care which flavor the engine is, as long as it supports all my App's SQL requests correctly?
- EvilTerran 14y ago
  It's awfully easy, when writing software that interacts with only MySQL, to end up depending on MySQL-only features. That wouldn't stop you switching to a MySQL fork, but would put a barrier between you and, say, PostgreSQL.
- garenp 14y ago
  In principle, the usual response to your type of question is that it's a problem that could be solved if all the parties of interest could agree on a standard to follow. For SQL DBs, there is an ISO/IEC SQL standard (1992,1999,2003,2008,2011), so it's not that there is a lack of a standard. If you look at the various issues brought up in this thread and other postings, you will find long standing bugs (and waves of duplicates & complaints) that have been filed for all of them on bugs.mysql.com, so it's not that there isn't interest in fixing MySQL; likely it's just not been a high priority for the project, and the value added for existing apps that already "work" with MySQL isn't there. Also, what motivation is there for MySQL--which is arguably the most popular open-source DB--to change to be more compliant? To answer your question concretely, which I read as: "Why can't we easily change out a SQL RDBMS as if it were a common component?" I would say: (1) Lack of standards compliance; in this case the SQL standard being the relevant one that MySQL doesn't follow. (2) DB specific extensions that many apps have become to rely on, often also caused by the previous point: apps having to rely on non-standard extensions due to the non-existence of a standard feature that could have otherwise been used. An earlier poster pointed out a few of these above (INSERT IGNORE, ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE, INSERT REPLACE, ...). (3) Due to a combination of both points above, supporting software in your favorite language or ORM either doesn't exist, is incomplete for a particular DB, or lacking in cross-platform support (e.g. the mylang-pgsql driver for Linux works but doesn't on Windows, OS X or some other major commercial UNIX OS like Solaris or AIX). (4) Finally, for open-source DBs there is practically no code re-use that matters; I see this as very unfortunate, because it could be a unique strength that only open-source projects can take advantage of. One reason for this is legal: different open-source DBs have different or conflicting licenses. But regardless of that (putting on flame suit now) much of the reason for a lack of code re-use is due to the fact that C and C++ make it pretty difficult to do well--which is a point I find true across all codebases in general (i.e. different C, C++ codebases share very very little code).
greenback 14y ago
This sounds a bit premature. I have MySQL running on several server instances. They will continue to run.
hnruss 14y ago
Dear Oracle: Who are you trying to impress by removing test cases and revision history? That just seems like a dumb idea all around. I cannot imagine what you are gaining from that. What are you losing? Me, as a developer/user of MySQL and your software in general (in the cases where I have a choice, anyways). Also, I'll be avoiding you as a potential employer, now. See ya
roberto66 14y ago
And that why its so important that you can not sell and change the ownership, control of a community driven software project. So the community is sure that not one person can sell the projects efforts from all community members. MySQL could be sold bcs it was controlled by one person same as with Linux, Drupal,... and in contrary to ie examples like Joomla that set up a legal entity to secure Joomla for a l l community members.. http://opensourcematters.org/index.php http://opensourcematters.org/index.php See and learn from Joomla how they structure their real open source project where all members are guaranteed part of ownership, development and engagement of the project. Start with the legal part to secure your open source project for ever!

169 points by mariuz 14y ago

scottlinux 14y ago

Check out this GPLv2 fork / alternative mentioned: http://mariadb.org http://mariadb.org

mikescar 14y ago
Also, Percona rocks. XtraDB is just a drop-in replacement for InnoDB. http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server
ecaron 14y ago
We're using MariaDB at linkup.com and love it! Whenever I read "MySQL is becoming closed source" I think its just an indication that MariaDB needs more community interaction (like how the Fedora team ramped up marketing efforts when RedHat killed their non-RHEL distro.)
whalesalad 14y ago
When I got my new Macbook Air I decided to give mariadb a try locally instead of mysql. So far so good! 'brew install mariadb' and you're off to the races. It's 100% binary compatible, as far as I know. So far working great with some local wordpress/php apps as well as older django apps. I'm migrating slowly but surely to PostgreSQL though.

beedogs 14y ago

As soon as Oracle bought them, the writing was on the wall for an open-source MySQL. Look how quickly they murdered OpenSolaris. Oracle is anathema to open software.

taligent 14y ago
OpenSolaris is still available for download including the source. http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/ http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/ It's just not supported or maintained any longer.
- 3amOpsGuy 14y ago
  I miss Sun. They made some seriously cool stuff, and in their later years they were really quite progressive in their outlook and approach. Jonathan Schwartz, for me anyway, kicked off the whole cool, open and chatty top exec thing that's so common now.
  - jmj42 14y ago
    > in their later years they were really quite progressive in their outlook and approach. This is a common misconception about Sun. In fact, they were quite progressive from the beginning. They embraced a hybrid open/closed model from day one, for instance. They opened up some key technologies, such as NFS and SPARC. They maintained huge, comparatively, research budgets, with relatively few strings attached to productization of that research. Through the late 90s and very early '00 (Dotcom era) they were under constant pressure from institutional investors to cut research funding, but didn't. In the end, though, I have to agre. I miss Sun (though my friends and co-workers probably do not miss me talking about how great Sun is) [edit: cut-n-paste quote error]
  - batista 14y ago
    >I miss Sun. They made some seriously cool stuff, and in their later years they were really quite progressive in their outlook and approach. Yes, and look how well it worked out for them...
    - _delirium 14y ago
      One of the problems with corporate R&D in general it seems: what's successful for businesses and what's good for technological advancement often seem not to be in sync. Some of the best stuff has come from notoriously unprofitable groups, like the old Xerox PARC, which benefitted the whole sector, but not its originators.
      - russell 14y ago
        Unlike most corporate R&D, PARC did good stuff. It was Xerox HQ that was exceptionally stupid. They had all the technology, but managed to do very little with it. Silicon Valley companies picked it up and ran with it.
metachris 14y ago
Also same story with OpenOffice, and Jenkins/Hudson.
jacques_chester 14y ago
The writing has been on the wall ever since MySQL AB required copyright assignment. Monty doesn't come to this with clean hands.
- mrkurt 14y ago
  Copyright assignment is basically required if you're going to sell an open source project under a different license. It's not usually nefarious, all that contributed code is still available under GPL.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    The point is that if one entity owns the original copyright, they can wreak sufficient havoc that the project can splinter into individually anaemic forks. MySQL has splintered into at least 3 competing forks outside of the "real" MySQL: MariaDB, Percona and Drizzle.
    - fallenpegasus 14y ago
      I wouldn't say they "compete", at least, not harmfully. Maria and Percona swap patches with each other, and are drop-in replacements for MySQL. Drizzle is an exploration of the idea of paying off as much as possible of MySQL's technical debt and throwing away crufty backwards compatibility. The technical ecology of users and developers around MySQL is healthier than it has ever been.
  - davidw 14y ago
    > going to sell an open source project under a different license It's required where you want to sell a restrictively licensed (GPL, say) open source project under a commercial license. If it's licensed under something like the Apache license or BSD, you can do what you want with it. But then, so can everyone else, so you don't have the advantage you would with the dual license and require copyright assignment strategy.
    - rbanffy 14y ago

amouat 14y ago

HN just repeated slashdot? I don't remember that happening before...

Bill_Dimm 14y ago
Proof that time is now flowing backwards!
- HorizonXP 14y ago
  Indeed! You should see time flowing backwards in this YouTube video at this timecode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=LLjUp4g-9BFlW78BBJ-lVqRg&v=Y_9vd4HWlVA&feature=player_detailpage#t=545s http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=LLjUp4g-9BFlW78BBJ-lVqRg&#... Seriously, watch it. Very cool.
re_todd 14y ago
It's usually done in a more subtle, indirect way.
wglb 14y ago
Seems better if the underlying article is linked, rather than the slashdot blurb.

falcolas 14y ago

FWIW, in addition to MariaDB, there is Percona Server as well, and they are also maintaining a launchpad for the base MySQL code on Launchpad while Oracle neglects that codebase. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/08/16/where-to-get-a-bzr-tree-of-the-latest-mysql-releases/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/08/16/where-to-get-...

caseyf 14y ago
I highly recommend Percona Server. especially if you are using SSDs or a mix of SSDs and regular disks.
- __Joker 14y ago
  Can you elaborate ?
  - heretohelp 14y ago
    Percona has done a lot of work to enable MySQL to take advantage of SSDs, work that hasn't percolated into mainline or MariaDB.
    - latimer 14y ago
      I've benchmarked all three and it seemed like the vast majority of the performance improvement on SSDs was due to the XtraDB engine which is included with MariaDB.
      - heretohelp 14y ago
        coughs http://www.percona.com/software/percona-xtradb/ http://www.percona.com/software/percona-xtradb/
        latimer 14y ago
        Yes you have to install it separately for MySQL but it's enabled by default in MariaDB so their work has in fact made it into MariaDB.

jedberg 14y ago

This is an excellent opportunity for the Postgres community to step up an promote Postgres.

rbanffy 14y ago
I think this would be a mistake. This is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate that anyone can fork the MySQL codebase and create other plug-in replacement databases with it, such as MariaDB and Drizzle. All that is lost is the MySQL name and brand. PostgreSQL users and developers must seize the opportunity to show businesses that free software cannot be killed, not even by mighty Oracle. They and, most notably, Microsoft, have been trying to kill it for more than a decade now. Because the anti-free-software FUD machine (fed in part by Oracle itself) is already having a wonderful time with this.
- Udo 14y ago
  I wish I could mod this up a hundred times. PostgreSQL people themselves have been playing into the hands of corporate FUDders with their incessant and inappropriate peddling. MySQL is not your enemy, MS SQL Server is. Oracle's software empire as a whole certainly is your enemy. Show some solidarity with a fellow open source project! MySQL and PostgreSQL represent two very different implementation philosophies, and being able to choose between them according to taste and merits is a good thing. Most of us have suspected that the MySQL project itself was going to die as it was acquired by Oracle, in the same way Open Office died when it was acquired by Oracle. This is a company where good software goes to expire, either due to a deliberate intention or gross incompetence I can't say but I suspect it's a mixture of both. However sad that may be for the MySQL (or OpenOffice) brand name, the code itself lives on and continues to evolve within a rich open source ecosystem. Hence, sensational and petulant "RIP $PRODUCTNAME" articles are unnecessary. There is no threat to existing projects based on MySQL or any other successful open source project for that matter. Not only will this stuff be free forever, it will also continue to grow and be developed on its own. The corporate assassination of open source projects will only work if we let it, it's a purely psychological game.
  - 14y ago

xd 14y ago

"MySQL is dead, long live MariaDB" .. would have been a better headline. Mainly because very few MySQL users seem to be aware of MariaDB.

spudlyo 14y ago
Exactly. This controversy was both discovered and promoted by Monty, who has much to gain by the rejection of Oracle's brand of MySQL and the promotion of MariaDB. Having said that, I agree that this is a dick move by Oracle. It reminds me of when RedHat started shipping their kernel as one big source tarball, without patches, which undoubtedly pissed off both Oracle and the CentOS folks. Maybe they're taking a page from the RedHat playbook.
latimer 14y ago
Forgive my ignorance, but doesn't this harm MySQL forks as well? Since the test cases are unavailable from now on, say for example they wanted to reimplement a certain feature, isn't it much harder for them to validate that their implementation works correctly?

xxiao 14y ago

I switched to postgresql _fully_ since about half year ago, never looked back.

Groxx 14y ago

Is anyone actually surprised by this? Personally, I declared MySQL doomed (if not immediately dead) as soon as Oracle took over. I know this isn't proof of its death, but really. This was a long time coming.

nicthu 14y ago

Why are (some of?) the open source SQL-compatible RDBMS so different that you can't wake up any Monday and decide to use another one, so then proceed to unload all your data from your old one, load it into your new one, and proceed on your merry way? In other words, why should I have to care which flavor the engine is, as long as it supports all my App's SQL requests correctly?

EvilTerran 14y ago
It's awfully easy, when writing software that interacts with only MySQL, to end up depending on MySQL-only features. That wouldn't stop you switching to a MySQL fork, but would put a barrier between you and, say, PostgreSQL.
garenp 14y ago
In principle, the usual response to your type of question is that it's a problem that could be solved if all the parties of interest could agree on a standard to follow. For SQL DBs, there is an ISO/IEC SQL standard (1992,1999,2003,2008,2011), so it's not that there is a lack of a standard. If you look at the various issues brought up in this thread and other postings, you will find long standing bugs (and waves of duplicates & complaints) that have been filed for all of them on bugs.mysql.com, so it's not that there isn't interest in fixing MySQL; likely it's just not been a high priority for the project, and the value added for existing apps that already "work" with MySQL isn't there. Also, what motivation is there for MySQL--which is arguably the most popular open-source DB--to change to be more compliant? To answer your question concretely, which I read as: "Why can't we easily change out a SQL RDBMS as if it were a common component?" I would say: (1) Lack of standards compliance; in this case the SQL standard being the relevant one that MySQL doesn't follow. (2) DB specific extensions that many apps have become to rely on, often also caused by the previous point: apps having to rely on non-standard extensions due to the non-existence of a standard feature that could have otherwise been used. An earlier poster pointed out a few of these above (INSERT IGNORE, ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE, INSERT REPLACE, ...). (3) Due to a combination of both points above, supporting software in your favorite language or ORM either doesn't exist, is incomplete for a particular DB, or lacking in cross-platform support (e.g. the mylang-pgsql driver for Linux works but doesn't on Windows, OS X or some other major commercial UNIX OS like Solaris or AIX). (4) Finally, for open-source DBs there is practically no code re-use that matters; I see this as very unfortunate, because it could be a unique strength that only open-source projects can take advantage of. One reason for this is legal: different open-source DBs have different or conflicting licenses. But regardless of that (putting on flame suit now) much of the reason for a lack of code re-use is due to the fact that C and C++ make it pretty difficult to do well--which is a point I find true across all codebases in general (i.e. different C, C++ codebases share very very little code).

greenback 14y ago

This sounds a bit premature. I have MySQL running on several server instances. They will continue to run.

hnruss 14y ago

Dear Oracle: Who are you trying to impress by removing test cases and revision history? That just seems like a dumb idea all around. I cannot imagine what you are gaining from that. What are you losing? Me, as a developer/user of MySQL and your software in general (in the cases where I have a choice, anyways). Also, I'll be avoiding you as a potential employer, now. See ya

roberto66 14y ago

And that why its so important that you can not sell and change the ownership, control of a community driven software project. So the community is sure that not one person can sell the projects efforts from all community members. MySQL could be sold bcs it was controlled by one person same as with Linux, Drupal,... and in contrary to ie examples like Joomla that set up a legal entity to secure Joomla for a l l community members.. http://opensourcematters.org/index.php http://opensourcematters.org/index.php See and learn from Joomla how they structure their real open source project where all members are guaranteed part of ownership, development and engagement of the project. Start with the legal part to secure your open source project for ever!