Re: Oracle , what else ?

[Andy Shellam]

Hi,

> To see what will happen to MySQL take a look at how Oracle handled 
> InnoDb. How many updates have they released since they purchased it? I 
> really don't know so someone will need to check. Is Oracle is too big 
> to make MySQL updates any kind of priority? It seems that the larger 
> the company and the more products they have, the less interest they 
> have in their lower revenue making products. I hope this is not the 
> case with Oracle, but the updates in the next year will determine 
> where MySQL is headed.

On a similar note, Oracle bought Sleepycat in February 2006 and hence 
acquired the embedded BerkeleyDB database in the process.  In the 3 
years since then I believe there has been two updates released to 
BerkeleyDB.  Previous to the acquisition I was updating BerkeleyDB on my 
servers roughly once every few months.

Personally (and I hope I'm wrong) I don't believe there's room in 
Oracle's portfolio for two diverse RDBMSs, and I envisage them 
re-branding MySQL as an Oracle open-source derivative which begins as 
being the MySQL codebase but is slowly migrated toward Oracle's 
engineering, to ease the transition for growing companies moving from 
MySQL/Oracle open-source to the Oracle enterprise versions.

Having said that this is pure speculation, and only yesterday I read 
something in the manual that a particular option was going to be 
deprecated in MySQL 7 - we haven't even seen 6 in beta yet!  Like Mike 
said, the next year or so will tell.