6 ms·

The Decline of MySQL?

58 points by mariuz 14y ago

alttag 14y ago
One of the things that won't change immediately, but will change over the long term is the availability of people familiar with MySQL. With the cost structure described in the article, MySQL will start disappearing from university database courses. I used it when I taught databases. (It's bad enough that some of them use Access, but at least MySQL was supported for most.) This is double trouble, as MySQL Workbench was an introductory tool for many database features. This is the reason (IMNSHO) Apple spent so much money in the 90s putting their software in schools, and why Microsoft has done the same this century at the university level. Software is a "gateway drug", and Oracle may be killing that.
- taligent 14y ago
  The article is 2 years old and was as wrong then as it is now. MySQL, OpenOffice, Java, Glassfish are all still as free and open as they've always been.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    This[1] article is brand new, though. [1]: http://blog.mariadb.org/disappearing-test-cases/ http://blog.mariadb.org/disappearing-test-cases/
- larrys 14y ago
  "This is the reason (IMNSHO) Apple spent so much money in the 90s putting their software in schools" I've known that to be the case as well. I was able to find this to back up the point that you make: http://www.marketingapple.com/ http://www.marketingapple.com/ "In the late 1980s, shortly after Steve launched the original Macintosh he faced a similar problem to the one we were facing ten years later. Very few developers were interested in building software for a platform that was much smaller than the standard at the time (in 1987 it was MS-DOS, in 1997 it was Windows). Steve’s answer was simple: encourage higher education institutions to build software for the platform and hook students on the Macintosh, which they would later bring to their jobs after graduation. The AUC worked exceedingly well then, and so I suggested to Steve that we rebuild a similar program, and he emphatically agreed."
  - gaius 14y ago
    Counterpoint: Acorn.
BenjieGillam 14y ago
Error establishing a database connection Complements the post title perfectly :)
fields 14y ago
This page gave me an error connecting to the database. Ironic twist, or was there some other point?
- gklitt 14y ago
  I'm guessing this wasn't intentional, but it was still a good laugh.
  - foxhop 14y ago
    f5
Zash 14y ago
How is this news? Posted on November 6, 2010
- taligent 14y ago
  Well since mariuz is the developer for some Firebird admin tool (another open source database) I'm going to take a guess that spreading FUD about the most popular open source database is good business.
  - mariuz 14y ago
    We all knew that oracle mysql branch will go closed source and this is about that old prediction with the fact that now it really happens heroku is on postgresql engineyard is on postgresql can you spot some pattern here ? people started to leave mysql it's true that at a slower pace http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/postgresql-is-our-new-default/ http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/postgresql-is-our-new-de... the most popular ? hmm i think the sqlite is more popular with more deploys at least on mobiles : android,ios ...
  - larrys 14y ago
    That could be the case (FUD) but as someone who just tried to get Solaris 10 from Oracle which a few years ago you could get w/o restriction you now can download but can't get any patches unless you purchase a service contract. I believe the cost is roughly $700 - $800 per year USD. The way it was: http://news.cnet.com/Sun-releases-Solaris-10-for-free/2100-1016_3-5559021.html http://news.cnet.com/Sun-releases-Solaris-10-for-free/2100-1... http://news.cnet.com/Sun-to-set-Solaris-free%2C-after-a-fashion/2100-1016_3-5450749.html http://news.cnet.com/Sun-to-set-Solaris-free%2C-after-a-fash... The way it is now: "Production use of Oracle Solaris requires a support contract." http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris10/downloads/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris10/d...
PaulHoule 14y ago
Hegemonies don't end because they get weak, they end because something else gets stronger. Oracle's been doing good work at the boring task of making mysql work better on large multiprocessor machines. They've done a lot more to improve mysql than Sun ever did. (For that matter, Oracle's finally putting lambdas into Java too...) Postgresql is catching up, but like the Python and Ruby programmers who whine about PHP, team Postgresql has never seriously asked the question of why MySQL has had more market traction than Postgresql. (HINT: it's not just hype, for many people, MySQL was the product they wanted) And then there is the whole half-baked NoSQL peanut gallery. You can point to some success stories but if you pick the average NoSQL product and have run-of-the-mill results you might experience spending 8 months building a product and then discovering the performance sucks with any number of servers. Or getting a phone call Saturday evening from the CTO like "Dude, where's my data?" I wanted to like mongodb, it's got a beautiful design and even some funding -- on paper it's the closest thing to a company that could take on MySQL. But then there was the terrible sprint where I rebuilt something I'd built in MySQL, and despite mongodb supposedly having the correct kind of index, queries in mongodb took 20 sec where MySQL took 0.03 sec. The competition isn't quite ready yet.
- taligent 14y ago
  MongoDB works best when it is thought of as a JSON document store. And when you do and have lots of embedded entities it becomes very fast and with its fluid schema a lot easier to manage and maintain. For my use case I do a single query to fetch my self contained User object which would need 30+ queries if I was using a relational database. It's an order of magnitude faster. So really NoSQL databases aren't a replacement for relational databases just another alternative.
  - swah 14y ago
    THe only disadvantadge is that the secondary information you're storing in User - the one that would be stored in other tables - is now very hard to query. Am I right?
    - taligent 14y ago
kiplinger 14y ago
Wp MySQL error. Lol
anuraj 14y ago
Had been using mysql for 8 years. The product has improved over the years, and is still very simple to use. It would take a compelling reason for me to move to Postgresql. And right now, I don't see any. I want shit done!
- slurgfest 14y ago
  Because nobody 'gets shit done' in Postgresql...
philip1209 14y ago
I do not think that MySQL will be in decline until PostgreSQL has a suitable cross-platform GUI that doesn't cost $80. It is easy to manage MySQL due to programs like PhpMyAdmin and Sequel Pro, but PostgreSQL lacks such software. While the early adopter crowd has long since moved away from MySQL, at the moment the software is too easy for more general users to abandon.
- samgranieri 14y ago
  really? have you ever tried PgAdmin?
  - philip1209 14y ago
    I tried using it, but it was quite a rigmarole to get it to work with Heroku.
emiliobumachar 14y ago
> "As part of European Agreement, Oracle will maintain MySQL dual licensing until 2015." > "Oracle also striped out some of the capabilities from the MySQL Open Source version, like the NDB storage engine, for example, and now charges for this." Can they do this? Dumb it down before 2015? If they can, what would stop them from striping out more and bigger capabilities, effectively killing the Open Source version while maintaining dual licensing on paper?
Lasher 14y ago
Hard to comment on this and not sound like a "hater", but wasn't the decline of MySQL as an open source solution pretty much inevitable the second Oracle acquired it? Oracle have handed other open source DB providers a gift, let's hope they make the most of it.

58 points by mariuz 14y ago

One of the things that won't change immediately, but will change over the long term is the availability of people familiar with MySQL. With the cost structure described in the article, MySQL will start disappearing from university database courses. I used it when I taught databases. (It's bad enough that some of them use Access, but at least MySQL was supported for most.) This is double trouble, as MySQL Workbench was an introductory tool for many database features. This is the reason (IMNSHO) Apple spent so much money in the 90s putting their software in schools, and why Microsoft has done the same this century at the university level. Software is a "gateway drug", and Oracle may be killing that.

taligent 14y ago
The article is 2 years old and was as wrong then as it is now. MySQL, OpenOffice, Java, Glassfish are all still as free and open as they've always been.
- icebraining 14y ago
  This[1] article is brand new, though. [1]: http://blog.mariadb.org/disappearing-test-cases/ http://blog.mariadb.org/disappearing-test-cases/
larrys 14y ago
"This is the reason (IMNSHO) Apple spent so much money in the 90s putting their software in schools" I've known that to be the case as well. I was able to find this to back up the point that you make: http://www.marketingapple.com/ http://www.marketingapple.com/ "In the late 1980s, shortly after Steve launched the original Macintosh he faced a similar problem to the one we were facing ten years later. Very few developers were interested in building software for a platform that was much smaller than the standard at the time (in 1987 it was MS-DOS, in 1997 it was Windows). Steve’s answer was simple: encourage higher education institutions to build software for the platform and hook students on the Macintosh, which they would later bring to their jobs after graduation. The AUC worked exceedingly well then, and so I suggested to Steve that we rebuild a similar program, and he emphatically agreed."
- gaius 14y ago
  Counterpoint: Acorn.

BenjieGillam 14y ago

Error establishing a database connection Complements the post title perfectly :)

fields 14y ago

This page gave me an error connecting to the database. Ironic twist, or was there some other point?

gklitt 14y ago
I'm guessing this wasn't intentional, but it was still a good laugh.
- foxhop 14y ago
  f5

Zash 14y ago

How is this news? Posted on November 6, 2010

taligent 14y ago
Well since mariuz is the developer for some Firebird admin tool (another open source database) I'm going to take a guess that spreading FUD about the most popular open source database is good business.
- mariuz 14y ago
  We all knew that oracle mysql branch will go closed source and this is about that old prediction with the fact that now it really happens heroku is on postgresql engineyard is on postgresql can you spot some pattern here ? people started to leave mysql it's true that at a slower pace http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/postgresql-is-our-new-default/ http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/postgresql-is-our-new-de... the most popular ? hmm i think the sqlite is more popular with more deploys at least on mobiles : android,ios ...
- larrys 14y ago
  That could be the case (FUD) but as someone who just tried to get Solaris 10 from Oracle which a few years ago you could get w/o restriction you now can download but can't get any patches unless you purchase a service contract. I believe the cost is roughly $700 - $800 per year USD. The way it was: http://news.cnet.com/Sun-releases-Solaris-10-for-free/2100-1016_3-5559021.html http://news.cnet.com/Sun-releases-Solaris-10-for-free/2100-1... http://news.cnet.com/Sun-to-set-Solaris-free%2C-after-a-fashion/2100-1016_3-5450749.html http://news.cnet.com/Sun-to-set-Solaris-free%2C-after-a-fash... The way it is now: "Production use of Oracle Solaris requires a support contract." http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris10/downloads/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris10/d...

PaulHoule 14y ago

Hegemonies don't end because they get weak, they end because something else gets stronger. Oracle's been doing good work at the boring task of making mysql work better on large multiprocessor machines. They've done a lot more to improve mysql than Sun ever did. (For that matter, Oracle's finally putting lambdas into Java too...) Postgresql is catching up, but like the Python and Ruby programmers who whine about PHP, team Postgresql has never seriously asked the question of why MySQL has had more market traction than Postgresql. (HINT: it's not just hype, for many people, MySQL was the product they wanted) And then there is the whole half-baked NoSQL peanut gallery. You can point to some success stories but if you pick the average NoSQL product and have run-of-the-mill results you might experience spending 8 months building a product and then discovering the performance sucks with any number of servers. Or getting a phone call Saturday evening from the CTO like "Dude, where's my data?" I wanted to like mongodb, it's got a beautiful design and even some funding -- on paper it's the closest thing to a company that could take on MySQL. But then there was the terrible sprint where I rebuilt something I'd built in MySQL, and despite mongodb supposedly having the correct kind of index, queries in mongodb took 20 sec where MySQL took 0.03 sec. The competition isn't quite ready yet.

taligent 14y ago
MongoDB works best when it is thought of as a JSON document store. And when you do and have lots of embedded entities it becomes very fast and with its fluid schema a lot easier to manage and maintain. For my use case I do a single query to fetch my self contained User object which would need 30+ queries if I was using a relational database. It's an order of magnitude faster. So really NoSQL databases aren't a replacement for relational databases just another alternative.
- swah 14y ago
  THe only disadvantadge is that the secondary information you're storing in User - the one that would be stored in other tables - is now very hard to query. Am I right?
  - taligent 14y ago

kiplinger 14y ago

Wp MySQL error. Lol

anuraj 14y ago

Had been using mysql for 8 years. The product has improved over the years, and is still very simple to use. It would take a compelling reason for me to move to Postgresql. And right now, I don't see any. I want shit done!

slurgfest 14y ago
Because nobody 'gets shit done' in Postgresql...

philip1209 14y ago

I do not think that MySQL will be in decline until PostgreSQL has a suitable cross-platform GUI that doesn't cost $80. It is easy to manage MySQL due to programs like PhpMyAdmin and Sequel Pro, but PostgreSQL lacks such software. While the early adopter crowd has long since moved away from MySQL, at the moment the software is too easy for more general users to abandon.

samgranieri 14y ago
really? have you ever tried PgAdmin?
- philip1209 14y ago
  I tried using it, but it was quite a rigmarole to get it to work with Heroku.

emiliobumachar 14y ago

> "As part of European Agreement, Oracle will maintain MySQL dual licensing until 2015." > "Oracle also striped out some of the capabilities from the MySQL Open Source version, like the NDB storage engine, for example, and now charges for this." Can they do this? Dumb it down before 2015? If they can, what would stop them from striping out more and bigger capabilities, effectively killing the Open Source version while maintaining dual licensing on paper?

Lasher 14y ago

Hard to comment on this and not sound like a "hater", but wasn't the decline of MySQL as an open source solution pretty much inevitable the second Oracle acquired it? Oracle have handed other open source DB providers a gift, let's hope they make the most of it.