On Wednesday 15 February 2006 01:38, Tom Lane wrote:
merlyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Randal L. Schwartz) writes:
Oracle purchases Sleepycat. From what I understand, BerkeleyDB was the
"other" way that MySQL could have transactions if Oracle decided to
restrict InnoDB tables (after purchasing Innobase last year).
Does this mean the other shoe has dropped for MySQL AB?
The deal's not gone through yet, but it sure does look like they want to
put a hammerlock on MySQL ...
Is it possible that Oracle is trying to buy MySQL to kill off other open
source competitor, e.g. PostgreSQL? MySQL has a strong number of users and
therefore it is a good deal for Oracle to buy MySQL. Then by doing that,
Oracle will market MySQL as the low-end alternative to their own database to
give a full solution to the customer. And this would slow down the take up
rate for other database competitor.
I've always thought that mysql has a large number of users because all the
various web apps (guestbooks, forums, blogs, calendars, etc.) were written
with mysql as the backend. So, average joe who wants a blog is going to
end up using mysql because that's his only *free* choice.
I base this just on my occasional inquiries into such software and how
many of them support mysql and not postgresql.
I would think that if mysql dissappeared all of those applications would
switch to either sqlite or postgresql in a heartbeat. Some already are...
I also suspect the windows version of mysql had a lot to do with it as
people could run IIS, php, and mysql locally on their desktop for their
development server...
-philip
