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Comment by dgallagher | Hacker News Reader

I personally picked PostgreSQL instead of MySQL since I don't trust Oracle. Why support a free database server when it competes with Oracle RDBMS? Granted Oracle RDBMS is extremely expensive, but still, something doesn't sit well with me...

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I felt the same mistrust for Oracle, but at Railsconf, I had the chance to talk with the team from Percona, which is a free fork of MySQL that makes some performance improvements and sells consulting (think Red Hat).

The Percona team said that Oracle has a lot of customers who are using Oracle RDBMS for big stuff and MySQL for smaller stuff, and they like being able to sell support for both, but they don't see MySQL as competing with their flagship DB. He also said that Oracle has so far kept their promise to keep developing MySQL and that Percona has pulled their upstream changes.

Besides that, if Oracle decides to stop supporting MySQL, Percona is a drop-in replacement, as is MariaDB, developed by some of the original MySQL developers. So you won't get stuck.

All of that said, however, I'm interested in PostgreSQL just because I've heard that it's a well-made database. There's nothing wrong with switching for other reasons; I just don't think that uncertainty about MySQL's future is a good reason right now.

Thanks for the clarification billybob. :) Part of my perception was driven by the unknown; what would happen if Oracle stopped putting money into it? It's nice to hear that Percona appears to be a potential candidate to continue its development if anything bad ever happened to it on Oracle's end.

This is a good point, but only became the case fairly recently. I might lean towards pgsql in the future based on that, actually.

MySQL is licensed under the GPL, and that isn't going to change. Oracle can't kill MySQL, nor can they force you to pay for it. I think your fears are unfounded.

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