May 5, 2008 | Posted By : Jason Brown at 3:30 AM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (1)

The way of the DB Dodo

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.

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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 InnoDB, 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)

# Posted By Mark Leith | 5/5/08 8:12 AM

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