The way of the DB Dodo

Tags:  Open-source  MySQL  database 

****EDIT

i want to thank Mark below for pointing out something that often gets overlooked.  I should have dug a bit deeper before I started with this post.  I do believe I was objectionalbe and was giving my opinion about how and where things may go, but I could hvae been more cautious.  Please read his comments if you read this post.

 jb

So I've been reading and trying to keep up with what's going on with Sun and MySQL these last couple of months.  Seems like this has the potential to become another fantastic open source project that is moving towards closing some of it's source (some of the most wonderful parts of it's source).  While this has ovbious consequences, it also shows potential for much needed growth.  While we may loose some of the most wonderful things about MySQL availabe to us now as an open-source project, we very well may see some fantastic developments in how databases work and what we can do with them.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of closing the source on a project like this, but I'm also a fan of progress (a term used very loosely in mixed company such as this ;-) ), however there are a number of good things we may see.  Remember many of the applications (email, shopping carts, groupware colaboration and most anything with advanced dynamic content) rely heavily on a relational database for the backend to work.  While we have a couple of other open source projects to use for this, none are as popular as MySQL.

Just some stuff off of the top of my head for now.

jb 

Jason Brown is the acting CTO for Atmail and focal point for Atmail Appliance systems, based out of Polson, Montana. Jason has a wide range of experience in providing hosting solutions for Email services for his own business. In his spare time, Jason promoting "Security Through Awareness" and resear... (Read full bio)

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Comment by Anonymous on Monday, May 05, 2008

We're not close sourcing anything that is already released under the GPL. This is a huge misconception from the 'announcement' (which was not officially done by us).

There is discussion, I believe nothing is final yet, on MySQL reserving some online backup drivers for specific storage engines for use by our customers only. The actual backup interfaces that these drivers will use is still completely open source, and available in the GPL product.

So, we are basically looking at keeping some drivers back for customers, which are only really needed by our most high end users (those that require a 100% online backup).

Of course, you can still do a mysqldump with --single-tranasction if you are fully MYISAM, or use a slave server for a backup if using MyISAM and your master must stay online full time.. So really there is a work around for each, the driver we are discussing here just saves the expense of a second replicated server for the backup platform in essence, I believe, as well as a huge convenience factor.

But *please*, help us not spread this FUD about us close sourcing our project, this is simply not true - MySQL will remain Open Source! :)

Best Regards

Mark (a MySQL employee)

Comment by Anonymous on Monday, May 19, 2008

Thanks for the input Mark. I certainly don't want

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