Saturday, July 25, 2009

OSCON: The saga of MySQL - O'Reilly Radar

Via Dave Kellogg; read the full post for more on the sorry state of MySQL

Returning back to my original point now, we can see that the acquisition of MySQL AB by Sun hasn't worked out at all how everyone had hoped. Many of the fears raised by my blog post from 3 years ago have manifested in this mess. After MySQL became a Sun property, the quality of MySQL started to suffer, including releasing a version of MySQL that had serious known bugs. This had never happened before and sent a clear signal that not all was well with MySQL. And the community had a lot of frustrations with Sun as Sun slowed or stopped accepting patches. Even important companies like Google had serious patches to MySQL ignored. Clearly the process had broken down.

Today we find ourselves with at least three versions of MySQL that all have differing goals, yet promise to share code with one another. Some will be compatible with each other, some break new ground. The one thing we know for certain that nothing in this game is certain. Until Oracle makes a statement about the future of MySQL nothing will be clear.

OSCON: The saga of MySQL - O'Reilly Radar

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