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'Open Source' Database Poses Threat to Oracle (Wall Street Journal)'Open Source' Database Poses Threat to Oracle (Wall Street Journal)Posted Jul 17, 2003 1:02 UTC (Thu) by leandro (guest, #1460)Parent article: 'Open Source' Database Poses Threat to Oracle (Wall Street Journal) This is poetic justice. Oracle gained proeminence by supporting more or less equally all OSs, thus turning the platform into a commodity; while keeping their data query language proprietary by failing to implement even basic SQL constructs such as some data types. So now Oracle gets competition from free software DBMSs -- beware, a database is what you manage with a DBMS! -- that may not be so platform agnostic, as they tend to priviledge POSIX, and may not be so SQL-conformant, as some are still approaching the full ISO SQL 92 Holy Grail (PostgreSQL for instance) and some still haven't got the mindset (MySQL). This will take a long time to mature if ever, because POSIX isn't (¿yet?) that dominant, lots of that living in mainframes and Microsoft systems; and because MySQL has taken lotsa wind from the standards game by getting the spotlight without being minimally SQL conformant despite its name. But the hope is that either MySQL will finally get a clue, or PostgreSQL and other will finally get the deserved popularity. My guess is that when this finally matures, Oracle won't have gone away on the proprietary side, and really relational systems which are now appearing (Alphora Dataphor) will have begun to see real-world free implementations (The Third Manifesto). So (My|Postgre)SQL may be in for a short stardom. But all bets are off.
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