Sun Bought MySQL: Are You Concerned? I Am
The big news the day after Steve Jobs' MacWorld keynote is that Sun bought MySQL AB (the company that drives the Open Source MySQL database server).
MySQL Announcement
Sun Announcement (press kit)
I've been using MySQL more and more since 2001 for both my day job as well as personal projects. As many people have said in various blogs and news articles, the "M" in LAMP is for MySQL. And, I'm concerned about the future of MySQL under Sun's control.
Sun has been trying to transform itself from a hardware company into a software services company (or something akin to that). That is why they changed their stock ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA a while back. But, how well are they executing as a software company? If stock performance is an indicator, not so good. Let's look at another software company that gets criticized for its post-dot-com boom stock performance: Microsoft. An eyeball estimate seems to indicate that JAVA (Sun) has increased just a hair over 0% in the past 5 years. MSFT (Microsoft) is up about 30% in that period. And, for yucks, AAPL (Apple) is up over 2000% in 5 years. OK, this is not the best or only measure. But, it is one that is easy to understand on a surface level.
It seems to me like Web 2.0 is built on Javascript (no relation to Java despite the name), XML, Ruby on Rails, PHP, (yes) MySQL, and a host of other dynamic languages (and maybe Microsoft .NET too). Java seems to be mostly for large (enterprise) projects that speak to transactional database engines like Oracle and DB2. And, I'm not sure MySQL will find a comfortable home at Sun. Looking at it another way, how would you feel if Apple had announced it bought MySQL today? I would not have felt comfortable with that even though Apple has shown tremendous growth because growth is not the whole story.
As a MySQL user, I hope that this acquisition works out. But, I think I am going to hedge my bets and start looking at how to migrate my data to PostgreSQL in the next few years.
I hope Sun can make MySQL as
I hope Sun can make MySQL as robust as postgreSQL is today. MySQL is not a bad database but I would not use it today in production software.
Java is a strong language today and if that knowledge comes to MySQL, all would be fine.
I think Sun has a lot to
I think Sun has a lot to offer MySQL in supporting enterprise customers. I also hope they will add more enterprise ready features that will make MySQL more highly available and scalable. I think this is something that is limiting MySQLs ability to take over in the enterprise the way Linux has. I speak about this with confidence because during a training session on MySQL myself and co-workers could see all the gaps that prevent us from really replacing Oracle and SQL Servers systems in our enterprise effectively.