On MySQL and Oracle
I think Monty has well and truly lost it.
The European Commision, after careful consideration, 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.
I'd go one step further, and would say that MySQL is not a credible alternative to PostgreSQL. But whatever. Hopefully, if MySQL fails, then PostgreSQL will (finally) get the attention that it deserves. I'll have a real database every time over this piece of... anyway.[1]
This is a fair argument, and to be sure it is certainly not a problem for anyone to migrate from MySQL to a MySQL fork, or (with some work) from MySQL to PostgreSQL. But Monty seems to disagree, and now tries to get Russia and China to block the merger.
What's next, Andorra?
[1] comments on this blog item in defense of MySQL will be vigorously moderated away. MySQL is a POS that falls over if data is corrupt, that corrupts its own data (most distributions call 'mysql_recover' in their initscript for a reason), and whose C API does not properly support cursors unless you want to block concurrent access until the cursor is closed (paragraph 3). Every time a customer asks me about MySQL, I vigorously recommend against it, because it's a bad idea.
MySQL has caused me so much anguish I have removed it from my resume in hopes that no one contacts me for any work involving it.
Sadly, not even opensource is free from the detrimental effects of marketing.
Quite right. The self-proclaimed 'database' mysql returns no error when a string exceeds the field length but simply cuts it.
A company I worked for some time ago discovered this after 5 people have been inserting product descriptions for two months which where cut after 256 chars.
And yet the pr*cks of mysql published everywhere how fast their 'database' was. No wonder it is fast if there is no error checking. A thingy that does not either return what one puts into it or elsewise returns an error value does not deserve to be called 'database'. Hopefully Oracle puts it into the trash bin
It's live its been always, PostgreSQL is "real" database getting faster and faster, MySQL was fast "thing" getting more features of "real" database from relase to relase. Still, i'd like MySQL like replication in PostgreSQL, setting up things like Slony is retarded
That was a sarcastic joke.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear: Andorra is a beautiful country. I've been there, and I may want to go back there some day.
The point was that the merger of a US-based company with another US-based company is a US business; it is not really the business of the EU (though something could be said for the fact that the "problem" with this merger was with something made by a European subsidiary of one of the US-based companies, so mmkay), it is not a chinese or russian matter, and it most certainly would not be an andorran matter.