On Thursday 16 February 2006 10:15, Steve Manes wrote: > Leonard Soetedjo wrote: > > 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. > > If Oracle rebuilt MySQL to provide a seamless, plug-compatible migration > upgrade to Oracle this might be a successful marketing strategy. But if > a customer had to rebuild his database layer to move up to Oracle from > MySQL, as he currently does, what would be the incentive to use MySQL > over PG? I've used ORM tool (propel) for PHP and it makes changing from MySQL to PostgreSQL as easy as changing the config from mysql to pgsql. And I believe in Java/.NET there is Hibernate and such. (Of course here I'm assuming that a lot of projects are done in PHP and Java or .NET, AND they use ORM tools). Sidetracking a little, I've got to admit that I'm not very sure of the impact of ORM to databases. Some OO proponents insist on not using stored procedure etc. unless there is a compelling reason (e.g. Martin Fowler in his book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture). So actually a database like MySQL4 would suffice, as much as I hate to say it. And since MySQL already has got the upperhand in terms of marketing, Oracle would buy MySQL to make it as the low-end alternative. Never mind the lack/immature features in MySQL such as stored proc or trigger. Is my argument valid or am I only seeing one side of the coin? Regards, Leonard Soetedjo
