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EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

[Posted January 21, 2010 by jake]

The European Commission has cleared Oracle's purchase of Sun. "The Commission's investigation showed that another open source database, PostgreSQL, is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative to MySQL and could be expected to replace to some extent the competitive force currently exerted by MySQL on the database market. In addition, the Commission found that 'forks' (branches of the MySQL code base), which are legally possible given MySQL's open source nature, might also develop in future to exercise a competitive constraint on Oracle in a sufficient and timely manner." Meanwhile, opponents of Oracle's purchase, including MySQL founder Michael "Monty" Widenius, have turned to Russia and China in an effort to block it.

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Jan 21, 2010 15:31 UTC (Thu) by sylware (guest, #35259) [Link]

Ok, mysql is dead.
Any little system to manage indexes on a 64 bits mmaped file with a network protocol?
Tokyocabinet would be a fertile land for this.

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 21, 2010 16:56 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]

Isn't fear mongering great?

Oracle has zero incentive to destroy part of a company they have acquired. Oracle makes money on support. What Widenus really fears is that Oracle will come in with real support options and the MariaDB company will die because he can't match their support offerings and he won't be able to sell commercial licenses against it. This campaign has never been about FOSS, it's been about the commercial ecosystem while claiming to be about FOSS. We saw the same thing on LWN when Monty's supports gave all the reasons this will hurt the commercial MySQL ecosystem while claiming this is a FOSS issue.

I actually expect that Oracle will spend far more money on MySQL than SUN ever did. This is a perfect product for them to up sell and sell support on. Sure it's probably going to put a lot of little businesses with commercial MySQL offerings out of business in five years as they turn to providing the capability in house but I don't see that as a bad thing. Contrary to the MySQL employees claims the commercial ecosystem isn't needed for the FOSS portion to survive.

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 21, 2010 17:28 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Oracle has bought and destroyed competing software products more than once, so the fear isn't irrational.

Nevertheless, anyone can release a derivative work of MySQL under GPL2, so Oracle has no power to kill it. No one but Oracle can sell licenses to use the mysql code in a way that conflicts with the GPL, and evidently Monty wants to be able to do that.

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 21, 2010 18:03 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

Oracle didn't kill InnoDB.

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 21, 2010 23:17 UTC (Thu) by rstreeks (subscriber, #1018) [Link]

Can you give me some example of this behavior.

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 21, 2010 15:40 UTC (Thu) by eparis123 (guest, #59739) [Link]

The whole deal is a lesson in the importance of community.

Customers who depend on products that claim the "open-source advantage" without having any real-thriving community at all should think twice.

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 21, 2010 15:48 UTC (Thu) by azrael (guest, #53640) [Link]

MySQL is not dead. The same is for Java, OpenOffice.org and VirtualBox.
They are all GPL or LGPL - you can fork them anytime you want. No one can close them or kill them.
Monty is being a hypocrite when he wants to stop the merger after he sold his MySQL AB company and all the rights to MySQL for 1000000000$ (one billion dollars).

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 21, 2010 16:02 UTC (Thu) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]

While the source code is out there, it takes time to build a vibrant community
around such project. As such I can agree with other commenters, that it is not
good to rely on projects that do not really have huge a community outside
their owner. I cannot judge whether that applies to MySQL though.

The uncertainty must be unnerving for those relying on proprietary licensing.

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 22, 2010 3:52 UTC (Fri) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link]

> it takes time to build a vibrant community

indeed it does. People who force copyright assignment when *they* hold the copyright (and thus dual-licensing rights) would do well to remember that they are not even remotely encouraging the building of a community.

The hypocrisy from Monty&co is in starting to say this *now*, when they are no longer the copyright holders.

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 23, 2010 22:35 UTC (Sat) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]

[[the uncertainty must be unnerving for those relying on proprietary licensing.]]

Uh? Proprietary licensing doesn't exactly ensure that the product you're relying on won't be dropped either..

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 21, 2010 16:03 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Russia and China? Oh dear oh dear.

I suppose Russia at least has got an, er, *innovative* attitude to competition law. Not sure it's exactly what Monty would like though.

I have an idea...

Posted Jan 21, 2010 18:04 UTC (Thu) by gbutler69 (guest, #54063) [Link]

How about we all agree to stop talking about MySQL providing M.W. with free fodder for his
campaign to steal back commercial control of something he sold outright?

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 21, 2010 18:05 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

Finally. Too bad it took so long. (On the other hand, delaying it was very fortunate for some companies, e.g. IBM.)

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 22, 2010 8:24 UTC (Fri) by DYN_DaTa (guest, #34072) [Link]

It's sad that Monty needs to use FUD tactics in order to gain some attention ... well, time will tell.

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 22, 2010 16:41 UTC (Fri) by Simetrical (guest, #53439) [Link]

Any serious user of MySQL is already using the InnoDB storage engine. (The
default storage engine, MyISAM, is non-transactional, supports only table-
level locks, and is overall totally unsuitable for most serious load
patterns.) InnoDB is GPL+proprietary software owned by Innobase -- which
was acquired by Oracle in 2005.

Oracle could already have crippled MySQL by killing development of its only
serious storage engine. It didn't. It funded big improvements of InnoDB,
including major performance and scalability improvements. There's no
reason to think it will turn around and do something different to MySQL
itself. To the contrary, maybe it will now make InnoDB the default storage
engine as it deserves; MyISAM only really makes sense for special-purpose
loads, and it's probably been the default because MySQL didn't own InnoDB.

Oracle is a company whose goal is to make money. It currently only has a
super-high-end database product. MySQL expands its range of offerings by
giving it the leading low-end product too. If it encourages MySQL to grow,
it will own both the top and bottom of the market, giving it more leverage
to squeeze out competitors like MSSQL in the middle. If it kills MySQL, it
loses a valuable asset; the low end will go to a fork or PostgreSQL. It
has no rational reason to do this. MySQL doesn't seriously compete with
Oracle. Not to mention Oracle's made legally binding commitments that it
won't kill MySQL, at least not soon.

I'm much more interested in what will happen to Solaris. Oracle has been a
prime backer of btrfs, for instance, whose only real goal is to give Linux
a ZFS-like filesystem. Now Oracle will own ZFS. Will it see any reason to
keep its assets incompatibly licensed, or will it GPL Solaris and let ZFS
(et al.) get ported to Linux? btrfs won't be as stable and featureful as
ZFS for several years yet.

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 23, 2010 4:14 UTC (Sat) by lakeland (subscriber, #1157) [Link]

I disagree on a few points.

Firstly, there are still some serious uses of MyISAM - it's very fast for dumb things, so when you
don't need transactions, locking, etc. then it provides a good option. Also, it wasn't that long
ago that some of the fancier options (e.g. replication) were only supported by MyISAM. I do
agree that InnoDB is better in most instances.

Secondly, if they're going to change the default storage engine then I hope they go with Falcon
rather than InnoDB. In my opinion it is substantially better.

Thirdly, Oracle has a number of database products (Times 10 and Berkeley) and is not remotely
averse to killing off products when it sees a long term advantage in doing so. Just look at how
terribly they deal with products like Discoverer, Forms or Designer.

I don't know what will happen with ZFS - When I tested it in a deliberate hardware failure I
managed to corrupt all of the data after removing just one drive, which put me off exploring it
further (that was almost five years ago). I'm really holding out for a proper distributed filesystem
and Sun has much more potential to release one than any other company. It's possible that could
fit well with RAC or else Oracle may see that as competition as it brings replication to a lower
price tag - hard to know but that's what I'm going to be watching for :)

EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Posted Jan 23, 2010 23:50 UTC (Sat) by Simetrical (guest, #53439) [Link]

1) I did hedge by saying "most serious load patterns". Yes, if you're
doing inserts and selects only, MyISAM is fine. As soon as you have a
significant number of deletes or updates, its performance drops like a rock
due to lock contention -- any pending update or delete will block *all*
queries until a) all currently executing select queries have finished (so
the update or delete can begin), and then b) the update or delete finishes.

MyISAM has other critical flaws. For instance, if mysqld crashes, or even
sometimes if queries get killed, tables can become corrupted. This
requires a repair, which can take multiple hours on a large dataset.

Replication is (usually) statement-based in MySQL, so as far as I know,
it's always worked for any storage engine. It's certainly worked on InnoDB
since at least 4.0 (released in 2003), and I know that for a fact because
Wikipedia used 4.0, InnoDB, and replication until very recently.

MyISAM has a few advantages over InnoDB. For instance, it supports
fulltext search -- but for real work you don't want to use it, you want to
use an external search provider like Sphinx or Lucene, since those perform
vastly better. It takes up less disk space, but that's usually only an
issue with stingy shared hosts that limit your database size; disk space is
cheap. There are a few other goodies like prefix compression of indexes
that InnoDB doesn't have yet.

It makes sense to use MyISAM in some limited circumstances. But without
InnoDB, MySQL *would* be crippled, and it *would* make more sense for
InnoDB to be the default storage engine so MyISAM is relegated to the niche
use cases it's good at. So my point holds.

2) Falcon is dead, isn't it? The creator of Falcon, Jim Starkey, quit
MySQL in June 2008. It was meant to be the hallmark feature of 6.0, but
now the MySQL website officially says 6.0 is no longer being worked on.
Resources have shifted to Maria and InnoDB.

In any event, it seems premature to compare Falcon and InnoDB when InnoDB
has been in production use for a decade or so, while Falcon never
progressed beyond alpha. You can't call alphas "substantially better" than
shipping software; they aren't even usable.

3) Sure -- but they haven't killed InnoDB, and could have done so at any
time to MySQL's massive detriment. It's unlikely they'll try to kill
MySQL. It's possible, but then it will just be forked, or pgsql will take
over, or whatever. I don't think it's much to worry about.

4) Yeah, ZFS still has lingering reliability problems. But it's still
several years ahead of btrfs. Even if it's not quite ready for some sites,
it will be ready a lot sooner than any comparable alternative (and btrfs is
the only one of those).