Bye Bye MySQL
 

Oracle has bought Sun.

Well it would seem that MySQL as we know it today might cease to exist in the not too distant future.

More info here:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=16598

I realise that nothing has yet been officially said about the future of MySQL however it is logical to assume that Oracle are unlikely to continue with the MySQL platform considering that they have an extremely good database framework of their own.

Oracle and MySQL are not comparable products, and they serve a totally different market.

PS That link doesn't open for me.

check both definitions of an Oracle and the Sun, and you will see that they go well together... rofl

I hope to be rich by then and buy Oracle and reinstate MySQL ;)

p.s. I just learn how to pronounce it :mad:

Meh.. in the event of MySQL going away, there's always Postgre...

If mysql is open source, how can it be killed ? - surely anyone can just continue developing it ?

Killed ? Maybe because the source is too complex and blown specially since PostgreSQL is already in place and OpenSource ;)
At all, saying Oracle would kill Sun's products, maybe too early - time will show. Solaris and Java are some other Sun products and I doubt Oracle would kill these.

from what i know of the market, this is good news for open-source... like a sponsor for free development... it was already, but now it will be more efficient, and we will continue to see commercial development over MySQL instead of seeing it only serving free projects...

Hence the "as we know it today" How many people use anything other than the official Sun "supported" release? Have you ever heard of Maria or Drizzle? If you have, have you ever considered installing them over the "official" Sun release.

If Oracle drops MySQL there will of course be people who will continue to maintain the platform, however without somebody at the helm (i.e. Sun) it will be directionless and splinter into many different versions each with their own advantages, disadvantages and more importantly incompatibilities. IMHO open source works for single/dual developer small application frameworks, however once you get into the realms of "enterprise" frameworks (Apache, MySQL, OpenSSL, Subversion etc) you need somebody at the helm maintaining course, direction & consistency. All you have to do is look at the myriad Linux distributions and their associated quirks to see what could happen.

Put your commerical Larry Ellison head on and ask yourself this, what is the incentive to continue to improve an open-source product that could compete with its existing flagship?

As I mentioned, this is an "if" - However if I was Oracle I would hold onto MySQL but mothball the project as it effects the bottom line of my primary database product, I most certainly would not consider improving the product in any way as this may result in loosing existing Oracle DB customers to MySQL. Another alternative would be that Oracle uses MySQL as an feature limited entrypoint into their primary Oracle DB system.

As for Oracle not killing Java that goes without saying, they do not have any comparable competitor product so the addition of Java to the Oracle portfolio is advantageous

Oracle != MySQL

They serve different purposes. Oracle is enterprise class database software. They know that the majority of people using MySQL will not pay for Oracle. I highly doubt MySQL is going anywhere. And if they really did drop it, somebody would fork it and continue the project, so it's not going away any time soon.