MySQL
Analysis of open source DBMS vendor MySQL (recently acquired by Sun Microsystems), its products, and other products in the MySQL ecosystem. Related subjects include:
MySQL disclaims interest in the ERP market
With Oracle acquiring first Innobase and now Sleepycat, MySQL has been under the gun to position itself more sharply. In response, their CEO reportedly disclaimed interest in the ERP market. That surprises me, as it contradicts what I hear from SAP, and have heard from the company in the past.
Frankly, if he even said what he’s quoted as being saying, I doubt he entirely meant it.
Anyhow, lots of MySQL reactions to the latest news may be found right on the Planet MySQL blog.
EDIT: Yeah, he didn’t mean it that way. See my Monash Report post for clarification.
| Categories: MySQL, Open source, Oracle | 1 Comment |
SAP, MaxDB, and MySQL, updated
I’ve had a chance to clarify and correct my understanding of the relationship between SAP, MaxDB, and MySQL. The story is this:
- MySQL has the right to sell MaxDB, but apparently isn’t focusing much on that.
- The MySQL and MaxDB code lines are NOT merging, for technical reasons. For example, the older MaxDB does a lot of its own thread management, while MySQL relies on the operating system for that.
- When SAP thinks a DBMS is capable of running SAP’s apps, it adds the DBMS to its product catalog and resells it. Yes, even Oracle. That’s why all my discussions with SAP of MySQL’s enterprise-readiness quickly come back to an exhaustive multi-year certification process.
- My personal best guess as to when MySQL will be in SAP’s product catalog is 1 1/2 – 3 years from now.
And by the way, MaxDB’s share in SAP’s user base is about the same as DB2’s (at least DB2 for open systems). MaxDB is being aggressively supported, and nobody should get any ideas to the contrary!
| Categories: IBM and DB2, MySQL, Open source, Oracle, SAP AG | 6 Comments |
So how robust is Ingres?
CA is spinning off Ingres, more or less, to an investment fund led by Terry Garnett, who will also be interim of CEO. Now, I’ve given Terry a lot of grief over the decades. It started by accident, when I bashed his presentation of Lightyear at a 1984 party in Rosann Stach’s house (where we also used Jerry Kaplan as a subject for the Mindprober psychological analysis product — those were the days of goofy software!). Years later, I didn’t even recall that had been Terry until I was reminded. But in the early 1990s, when Terry and Jerry Baker were dueling at Oracle, I was firmly in the Jerry Baker camp, and believe I was right to this day. Still — be all that as it may, Terry knows DBMS and knows promotion, and if the company falls flat it won’t be because he screwed it up. He’s no dunce, and he’s been around DBMS a loooong time.
But how stands the product? Let’s flash back a decade, to when CA bought it. Ingres was a solid general-purpose RDBMS. But it was beginning to fall behind the technology power curve, especially on the data warehousing side. (For more detail, see my Ingres history post over in the Software Memories blog.) And then product development slowed to a crawl. Tony Gaughan, who ran the product for CA before the latest move, claims that they’ve actually done a good job on advancing the product on the OLTP side, perhaps to the point of comparability with Oracle9i, and certainly ahead of MySQL 5.0. I’m inclined to believe him, after applying some reasonable discount factor for expected puffery, in part because this wasn’t a high hurdle to cross. Over the past decade, the main action in high-end DBMS product enhancement has been in data warehousing and nontabular datatypes, not in OLTP.
Where Ingres definitely seems to lag is in data warehousing. E.g., there are no materialized views, and I bet that even if they have some of the index types such as bitmaps, star schemas, etc., the implementation, optimizer support, administrative support, and so on lag far behind that of Oracle and IBM. So again, the proper comparison for Ingres isn’t Oracle and IBM; it’s fellow open source vendor MySQL. Only — deserved or not, MySQL has a ton of momentum for such a small company, incuding an attractive product plan partially fueled by SAP.
Appliance vendor DATallegro makes a plausibiity argument that Ingres can be adapted for nontrivial data warehouse uses as well. But while that’s cool, and might even become persuasive once DATallegro has some happy, disclosed customers, it’s not the same as saying you want to put a big data warehouse into off-the-shelf Ingres.
So basically, I’m afraid that Ingres is going to appeal mainly to users who either already are making major use of it, or else have a huge problem with paying the license fees demanded by other vendors. I wish them well, and hope they kindle a spark somehow; but right now I don’t see where it would be coming from.
| Categories: Actian and Ingres, Data warehouse appliances, MySQL, Open source | 2 Comments |
Open source DBMS — easier to install?
Lewis Cunningham compared the installation ease of Oracle, PostGRES and MySQL. Despite expecting Oracle to win (uh, why?), he wound up ranking PostGRES first, with Oracle and MySQL tied — and that’s after marking MySQL down (indirectly albeit not directly) for lacking documentation in a beta release.
This just goes to show: The inherent complexity of the high-end products can outweigh users’ greater familiarity with them.
Besides, ever more people — especially cheap recent grads — are familiar with MySQL.
EDIT: Cunningham has a little more to say here.
Technorati Tags: Database, DBMS, DBMS2, MySQL, Oracle, PostGRES
| Categories: MySQL, Open source, Oracle | 1 Comment |
Oracle vs. open source DBMS
Mark Rittman had a great thread last November questioning the need for Oracle’s advanced features at most installations.
Pretty similar to what I’ve been saying, but more from a developers’ or DBA’s standpoint than a CIO’s.
Technorati Tags: Database, DBMS, DBMS2, Oracle, MySQL
| Categories: Microsoft and SQL*Server, MySQL, Open source, Oracle | Comments Off on Oracle vs. open source DBMS |
Down with database consolidation!
As with all changes in information technology, the move to DBMS2 will largely be one of evolution. But it does have a couple of revolutionary aspects.
Short-term, the biggest change is a renunciation of database and DBMS vendor consolidation. Consolidation never has worked, it never will work, and as data integration technologies keep improving it’s not that important anyway.
IBM and Oracle offer really great, brilliantly complex data warehousing technology. But if you want the most bang for the buck, forget about them, and go instead with a specialty vendor. Depending on the specifics of your situation, Teradata, Netezza, Datallego, WhiteCross, or SAP may offer the best choice, and that list could be even longer.
Similarly, for generic OLTP data management, cheap and/or open source options are getting ever more attractive. Microsoft is a serious contender for applications that previously only Oracle and IBM could handle, while MySQL and maybe Ingres are moving up the food chain right behind.
In many cases, these alternative technologies are lower-cost across the board: Lower purchase price, lower ongoing maintenance fees, and lower administrative costs.
So what, again, is the case for consolidation?
| Categories: Actian and Ingres, Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Database diversity, IBM and DB2, Kognitio, Memory-centric data management, Microsoft and SQL*Server, MOLAP, MySQL, Netezza, Open source, Oracle, SAP AG, Theory and architecture | Comments Off on Down with database consolidation! |
MySQL, SAP, and MaxDB
MySQL is like a star high school athlete — impressive skills and potential, but it still only excels at a limited range of mainly simple things. Will it grow into a robust, adult star? I think so, and here’s a big part of the reason why: MaxDB and SAP certification.
MaxDB is a database product that bounced among all the major German computer hardware and software companies: Nixdorf, Siemens, Software AG, and SAP. (What little fame it ever had was primarily under the name Adabas-D.) SAP eventually shipped MaxDB as the underlying DBMS at many R3 installations. This is a huge sign of OLTP industrial-strengthness; if a DBMS can run SAP’s apps, it can run pretty much anything. OK, not necessarily retail banking, airline reservations, and so on — but pretty much anything else.
Well, two years ago MySQL (the company) and SAP agreed to what amounts to a slow-motion merge between MySQL (the product) and MaxDB. The resulting joint product (currently still quite separate from MySQL 5.0) is undergoing a multi-year process of achieving SAP certification. Everybody involved clearly expects this certification to eventually succeed — in 2-3 years, probably, or perhaps less if they were being really coy with me.
And when that happens, there will be a version of MySQL that is unquestionably fit for rigorous OLTP.
Technorati Tags: Database, DBMS, DBMS2, MySQL, SAP, Software
| Categories: MySQL, SAP AG | 4 Comments |