Free Mind Systems

Since the acquisition of SUN by Oracle on April 20, 2009,  many Mysql users around the globe (from enterprises, ISV’s to individuals) are a bit skeptics about the future of Database and engines, at least as we know it now.

Yes, is Open Source.

So, there are alternatives:

• AskMonty MariaDB

Monty Program Ab was founded by Michael “Monty” Widenius, the founder and creator of MySQL. It consists of some of the original MySQL engineers, some new personnel, and Monty.

MariaDB, a branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, including the Maria storage engine. Our ambition is to make this the best open and free MySQL branch for the MySQL user and developer communities.

• Percona

Percona provides pay-as-you-go, prepaid and retainer-based consulting to create or scale applications built on the full LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and other open source technologies. Our customer list is large and diverse, including Fortune 50 firms, popular websites, and small startups.

• Ourdelta

OurDelta produces enhanced builds for MySQL, with OurDelta and third-party patches, for common production platforms. All the builds are freely available for download.

• The new Mysql-forked-enterprise Aliance
• and many other initiatives and patched versions.
  

Yes, Oracle in October 7, 2005 bought Innobase (the enterprise behind the InnoDB engine) and the most popular engine has been improved since this.

But many of the best engineers (at least those remaining from the acquisition of SUN to MysqlAB) are leaving SUN/Oracle.

As you can read, all forks are based on the official source tree or are patches to improve performance, enhacements of features or stability. But what happens if Oracle stops development, are MariaDB and others really prepared to start big developments? What happens with the cluster solution? Is the community really interested on ndb engine?

My twisted conclusions:

• Mysql isn’t on the same segment of the Oracle Database Family, Mysql+InnoDB has millions of users/clients and has a high market share of web based applications databases.
• Oracle with Mysql can compete with the fastest growing Microsoft SQL Server on the Mysql niche, where the traditional Oracle stack is too expensive.
• For ndb storage engine (the cluster based share nothing Mysql solution), is not clear the interest that Oracle can have. Isn’t a finish solution, has a lack of important features as foreign keys, complex querys performance, stability… and not have many clients requesting support (I like it). Also the list and forums is in mute mode (before purchase the SUN people was helping a lot).

In the lasts weeks, new versions of many products are released, is a good signal?