A while ago I posted about a comment a Sun performance engineer made about a scalable replacement for InnoDB. At the time, I did not believe it referred to Falcon. In hindsight, it seems even clearer that the Sun performance experts were already working hard on InnoDB itself.

Sun’s engineers have shown that they can produce great results when they really take the problems seriously. And I’m sure that InnoDB’s performance has untapped potential we don’t see right now. However, it does not follow that their work on InnoDB is what was meant by a scalable replacement for InnoDB. Or does it?

General-purpose MVCC transactional storage engines with row-level locking, whatever their performance and scaling characteristics in …

Welcome to the 145th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

MySQL

Since MySQL was surely the belle of the bloggers’ ball this week—why, everyone was talking—let’s begin with it.

Baron Schwartz started something with his post examining why MySQL might not benefit from having a mother ship. Dean Ellis of niflheim responded, arguing that everyone needs the MySQL mothership. And that got Sheeri’s Cabral’s attention—she took the middle path in her …

So, is Oracle’s acquisition of Sun good for MySQL or not so much?  And, specifically what does it mean for data warehousing on MySQL, which is one of the top 5 use cases for the leading open source database?  While there are mixed views in the market about the fate of MySQL, it’s usually pretty easy to predict Oracle’s behavior - they are a for-profit company looking to maximize their return on investment and protect their own commercial database business. 

For what they’re worth, my own views on the subject can be summarized as follows: 

• (1) Oracle will not kill MySQL. As I mentioned to Scott Denne from VentureWire the week of the Oracle/Sun …

Over the past two weeks I've been mostly focused on MySQL, but the big-ticket item in the Sun/Oracle deal is not databases, it's Java. However, it's also the domain which is far less clear to predict. It was a big deal when Sun decided to open source Java, but the fact of the matter is that the first fully open source release isn't out yet, and Sun has been keeping the testing and certification kit off-limits for open source communities. This means it would still be far too easy for OpenJDK to be killed off.

I've been keeping clear of Oracle for several years, and can't even begin to guess what their position on this is. Oracle has been a pretty active contributor to Linux in particular for several years, and I'm sure their open source strategy and how it works together with their business is pretty well established within at least the engineering …

This edition of Log Buffer is my first article on the Pythian Blog. It seems appropriate that, as I start a new chapter of my life in Canada and am looking to the future, a lot of the blogs this week are doing the same.

After the shock of the Oracle takeover the MySQL community is full of hope. Mark Callaghan has written about the new storage engines for MySQL and also suggestions for what the MySQL community could be doing while they wait to hear what Oracle has planned.

Kaj Arno has looked to the future and he thinks he has found some answers.

With the …

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled Dear IBM , I was too late .. I was on holliday last week when people started sending me text messages , such as .. "Game Over MySQL , Long live Ingress" or "No Eclipse for IBM", etc ...

I had ideas regarding the future of certain Sun products at IBM, now the game has changed .. it'ss how they will live on at Oracle :)

Similar Questions arise .. like indeed the future of MySQL, the future of Solaris etc ...

So regarding the future of MySQL , I don't worry at all, on the contrary ..
Oracle tried buying mysql before they already have Innodb .. they didn't kill it .. the MySQL offering is complementary to the Oracle offering, now they can tackle both markets.
And as already mentionned when writing my IBM letter ..

As for MySQL, Jeremey has some good insights.. the fact that …

I’m in the process of migrating remaining functionality of Tripod.com from using Oracle to using MySQL. There were some assumptions I had made about various data types, particularly dates. One thing I discovered while converting one piece of code is the Oracle function to_char(). I have a table:

SQL> select member_name, change_time from access_changes where member_name = 'phptester10' order by change_time desc;

MEMBER_NAME          CHANGE_TI
-------------------- ---------
phptester10          13-APR-09
phptester10          13-APR-09

So, I thought “ok, this is just going to be a ‘date’ type with a different format. For instance, 13-APR-09 will become 2009-04-13. But then I stumbled upon a query in a piece of code that does a sort on dates from this access_changes table:

SQL> select member_name, to_char(change_time, 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:mi:SS') from access_changes where member_name = …

As you may or may not know, long long ago (in this universe) I used to be the MySQL documentation team  Yes, a team of one. This was 2001. It was a great and interesting time. The current much extended team is doing a great job with the now much bigger set of docs!

Today, I find myself disagreeing with my former colleagues on one particular aspect, namely its licensing. You see, the documentation has never been released under an open license, it used to be plainly copyright all rights reserved, and later some rights were granted to distribute the docs together with the server.

Statements made earlier by Karen Padir regarding possible opening up of the docs license filled us with hope. Then, Stefan Hinz (the current docs team lead) wrote a blog entry MySQL documentation: no license change. Some of the arguments there we can …

Migrating from Oracle to MySQL is not easy. A few weeks ago Baron Schwartz summarized the culture shock in 50 things to know before migrating Oracle to MySQL. It's a great article but as you read through the comments it's easy to forget that culture shock can run the other way.

For example, try building horizontally scaled systems. Oracle has excellent "small" database editions like SE and SE1. However, they lack built-in replication of the type provided by MySQL. Even simple and effective deployment patterns like master-master replication do not exist. The usual approach in the Oracle world is to use RAC + Enterprise Edition features like Streams and DataGuard. That's great for large enterprises, but it's not a good method for smaller businesses and start-ups.

We have been working for some time on a …

In a blog post today, Stefan of the MySQL documentation team says that the MySQL documents will not be open sourced. Now, I have to go back and review the MySQL CE Keynote that Karen gave, but I'm pretty sure she said to the audience that it was "going to happen". Why would she even bother bringing it up in the keynote if it was never really being considered anyway? There has been little community input on this, and I for one am outraged that a GPL product would not release the documentation as GPL too.

I'm now totally convinced that MySQL does not understand, and will never understand the MySQL community.

Is this an opportunity for Oracle to try to stall community participation in MySQL? I don't want to be paranoid, but this could just be the hints of bold new changes in MySQL strategy, especially considering Karen's …