MySQL price hikes
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
The silver lining. Hopefully, this will mean that more projects will target Postgres as a primary deployment platform.
I recall when Tim Perdue published this article in 2000, and the strong impression it made on me that PostGres was the much better database:
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000705.php3
Tim found that PostGres could scale:
"The most interesting thing about my test results was to see how much of a load Postgres could withstand before giving any errors. In fact, Postgres seemed to scale 3 times higher than MySQL before giving any errors at all. MySQL begins collapsing at about 40-50 concurrent connections, whereas Postgres handily scaled to 120 before balking. My guess is, that Postgres could have gone far past 120 connections with enough memory and CPU."
At that time, circa 2000, developers often claimed that they could live without ACID reliability, in exchange for speed. Thus, there preference was for MySql. There is something to that argument of course. In recent years, the NoSql movement has gone much further, throwing out integrity as a concern, in exchange for massive scaling and fast speed.
Somehow, lost in the shuffle was the fact Postgres is, in most ways, technologically superior to MySql. It may not be as fast as MySql, in some situations, but for a wide range of purposes, it should be really be preferred to MySql. And I think, somehow, developers have often forgotten that, for a wide range of purposes, the best choice would be Postgres.
When you are trying to make your technology attractive to a broad base, it's important to remember that newbie developers will always take the simplest path, and that 95% of all computers are Windows boxes. If your software is not very, very Windows-friendly, you will lose first-timers to technologies that are. This was also one of the big, big factors in PHP's success.
Obviously, running a website or a database on Windows is a bad idea, but you need to learn how to code before you need to learn that fact.
It came down to one thing: the perception that MySQL was fast and Postgres was slow.
Further, MySQL was easier to setup due to its simplistic security model, and thus there was less to learn.
I've always said that Mysql (with MyISAM rather than InnoDB, to be fair) was like a bicycle without brakes. Yes, it's faster going down hills, however...
This is self-evident, but it's so easy to forget when one is familiar with the overall comparative technical merits - this one is so much better in most ways. How could the other one win?!
I've been watching PostgreSQL development back in the days and to me it's clear that the biggest mistake PostgreSQL made was not responding to market demands as quickly as MySQL did.
Windows support, built-in replication, built-in full-text search - those are all things that MySQL added much sooner than PostgreSQL. Those are also the features that people cared about and a big part why they were choosing MySQL over psql. At some point early lead turned into crushing defeat in terms of market and mind share.
You can claim that some other features constitute "best free rdbms" but clearly PostgreSQL team does think that those are included in that definition since eventually they added all of them. The problem is that they did it long after MySQL had them. Too little, too late.
The sad part is that it wasn't always a matter of coding but a matter of bad priorities and bad marketing (where I include defining what the product is and isn't as a fundamental part of marketing).
For example, I believe psql had high-quality full-text search coded before MySQL did but the core team resisted shipping it by default. Instead for a long time a super valuable feature was part of "contrib" package i.e. you had to jump through hoops (like compiling it yourself) to get it to work.
The main reason why PostgreSQL failed to MySQL was that the project was driven by extremely bright coders but terrible marketers.
For an rather more extreme example of this see OpenBSD, who basically say "if you want to use it go right ahead, but we build OpenBSD for our own use, not for your use."
According to reddit statistics, this is no longer the case (68% only). And back in 2000, I knew almost nobody in the web dev business using windows, but Macs instead.
Either you had a very eclectic group of friends, or your memory is slipping a bit.
The big in-rush of web developers to the Mac platform did not take place until Macs became Unix machines. Back in 2000, there was no such thing as OS X, unless you count the public beta. 10.0 suffered from abysmal adoption. I don't know any developers who used Puma, much less Cheetah. Most of us were using various Linux distros. However, by somewhere around 2003ish, with Jaguar, the switch had begun in earnest, but Mac's didn't predominate among web developers for a while longer.
I went to the store, then clicked oracle database, and found myself looking at licenses of Oracle database Enterprise for just six hundred pounds. That's a lot cheaper than I remember it being. I added to cart to see what would happen. When you do this, it adds a "first year support" line as well that's not quoted on the page but does contribute to your bottom line. I found that deceptive.
My link is here, it may not work for you: https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:2:0::NO:RP,2:P...
Then I had an idea about what might be going on. I dug further to find the yearly cost of support for the database. It's far more expensive, and back to the prices of the old days. So I assume that you buy it at a merely expensive price, and then if you want fixes to their bugs, you'll have to keep paying money for it at a higher rate on a per-year basis.
Digging further, I found a link for Oracle database standard edition that was far more expensive and quoted on a per-processor basis. £11,730.00 per processor. Ouch.
https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:144910...
I must have missed something. Does anyone know how this works?
I'm not a fan of monetizing software through support, but I would love see some people hitting it big and proving me wrong.
What it really means is that MySQL price was the same for past 6 years, when it was owned by MySQL, AB and then Sun, but as soon as ink dried on Sun acquisition, the first thing that Oracle did was to rise the prices.
Have they even released any new, improved version?
The generosity or Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison knows no bounds.
Correction: no lower bounds.
Unfortunately, I can't post it on the web outside the magazine for 3 months.
Those of us who build websites will be just fine with Percona until drizzle is ready (or maybe even forever).
Sounds like win-win (where both wins are for oracle, rather than the conventional meaning of both parties winning.)