You’ve no doubt heard the news by now of Oracle’s $7.4b takeover of Sun Microsystems. Apart from Oracle’s apparent desire to become IBM, the database world is abuzz with opinions on what will happen with the MySQL database that was purchased by Sun last year. I though it time to add my two pennies to the discussion.
My initial response to this news was fear and disappointment, having been a party to an Oracle takeover in the past (I was a member of PeopleSoft Consulting). I’ve come to love and appreciate the MySQL database over the years due to its robustness, speed, ease of administration and, obviously, cost. When a company like Oracle comes to town, you can be fairly assured that any software, especially a product that competes directly with Oracle’s flagship database offering, is doomed.
Of course, Oracle is commenting publicly that MySQL will be “an addition to Oracle’s existing suite of database products…” That may be true from the “let’s keep a dozen or so people in some building in case someone calls for support” perspective, but I think there are a couple of fairly recent examples that show what might happen:
Does anyone remember Informix? How about FoxPro?
Informix and FoxPro were vital players in the database market about 10 years ago, in the enterprise and desktop markets respectively. They were both purchased by larger competitors – Informix by IBM, FoxPro by Microsoft – looking mainly to remove competition for their own products (DB2 and Access respectively). Of course, that wasn’t the stated objective, but it was the practical result from the technology trenches where I was at the time.
So, what happened? Well, Informix was not actively marketed by IBM, so it faded from the enterprise scene, but still to this day has a few niches where it still performs well. FoxPro was essentially denied oxygen for survival and has died completely except for some legacy desktop applications – the last update to the environment was released with virtually no notice almost two years ago.
I find it hard to believe that Oracle will devote many resources to MySQL now that they have it, even though the product has a fairly large footprint in the open-source world. Yes, it could be argued that this lack of support has existed since the Sun acquisition, but I think it’s even more likely now. Two main reasons for this feeling: the obvious one where it’s a competing database product, and also that it was not the primary thing Oracle acquired with Sun – it just came along with the package.
One of the few positive articles I’ve found about the MySQL acquisition involves the marketing of the product, which doesn’t speak to well of the technological basis for retention of the product by Oracle. My fervent hope is that some group steps forward and takes advantage of the open-source nature of the product and creates a variant that continues technological development and returns the product to its community-based origins.
I’m not holding my breath, however…
