Oracle: savior, indifferent, or monster to MySQL?

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JAB Creations
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Oracle: savior, indifferent, or monster to MySQL?

Post by JAB Creations »

I think this article really clarified the political landscape as far as MySQL's fate is concerned...be it whatever that may be...
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/co ... 120632.htm

So in a nutshell Oracle is simply trying to gobble up Sun in order to increase the value of it's stocks and lock in customers to rigid monopolistic pricing like it has with numerous other companies.

I haven't seen an example of Microsoft gobbling up a smaller company with open source software...I'm sure it's happened...what I'm ultimately wondering is what is the likely long-term fate of MySQL? Is it likely to be spun off for Oracle to avoid monopolistic behavior or slowly digested in to something undesirable?

Has anyone with their personal work or the company they work for switched databases to something else like PostgreSQL or considering it?
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Bill H
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Re: Oracle: savior, indifferent, or monster to MySQL?

Post by Bill H »

What's interesting to me, not really related to your subject but interesting, is that the US regulators approved the deal without any hesitation and the European regulators are the ones blocking it due to the MySQL issue.

I didn't say it was surprising, merely that it was interesting.
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Re: Oracle: savior, indifferent, or monster to MySQL?

Post by JAB Creations »

I noticed that too...is it your opinion that our country's regulators are corrupt, less competent, the European regulators are overly sensitive, or something else?
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Re: Oracle: savior, indifferent, or monster to MySQL?

Post by Jenk »

We use PostgreSQL as our primary choice of DB. It's awesome. We all have a distaste for Oracle as well. Everywhere I've worked at, that uses Oracle, find themselves needing to have an Oracle certified DBA (or team of DBAs) to maintain it. We've got DBs much larger than those used elsewhere and not an overpriced DBA in sight (none at all, in fact) :)
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Re: Oracle: savior, indifferent, or monster to MySQL?

Post by Bill H »

I wouldn't say our regulators are corrupt, so much as they are just more favorable toward corporations, since they are part of a government that is more of a corporatist government. I do not mean that as a compliment.
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Re: Oracle: savior, indifferent, or monster to MySQL?

Post by JAB Creations »

Doing nothing really fancier then INNER JOIN queries would converting to PostgreSQL from MySQL be reasonably easy? I looked at the syntax and it looks pretty much the same. I'm not sure about the documentation however... I'd like to make the decision before I end up having a few hundred queries in question. How about existing table data? Doing a quick Wiki on phpMyAdmin it seems it's built exclusively for MySQL; would it work with PostgreSQL or is there an equivalent for PostgreSQL? I don't use phpMyAdmin to generate MySQL queries, it's a visual that helps me interact with my databases much more quickly.
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Re: Oracle: savior, indifferent, or monster to MySQL?

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(#10850)
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Re: Oracle: savior, indifferent, or monster to MySQL?

Post by JAB Creations »

Looking at various implementations of SQL I'm wondering if there is some set of SQL "neutrality" programming practices that one could follow to avoid relying too heavily on a given iteration of SQL (like MySQL)? I did find a couple of queries in my code that were not directly compatible with PostgreSQL in example though they wouldn't exactly require Earth-shattering changes if I changed between MySQL and say PostgreSQL.
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Re: Oracle: savior, indifferent, or monster to MySQL?

Post by Jenk »

MySQL doesn't conform to SQL standards (i.e. the syntax) so there are some differences that will require manual intervention if porting. PostgreSQL (at least claim to) comply fully to SQL standards. It is also an Object Relational Database, which allows some very powerful tools indeed.
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Re: Oracle: savior, indifferent, or monster to MySQL?

Post by JAB Creations »

Arborint, I have to work with what databases are available on my host...and I don't have a lot of host options (if I want certain important features)...I love cutting edge...but I'm not a hot shot with serverside stuff...or at least not yet!

Jenk, I figured there would be some changes I'd have to make...I can only presume I can test for true/false success/fail of PostgreSQL queries like I can with MySQL? I'm going to do more reading on Object Relational Databases after I finish tonight's work.
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