I am neither for nor against the Oracle-Sun merger. I am against the damage done by extending the uncertainty on the outcome of the deal. MySQL as an organization is in great shape. The 5.1 release turned out better than some expected. The InnoDB plugin is excellent. What is the roadmap? MySQL is limited in what they can say about their future. That hurts all users and customers.
A lot of nonsense has been written about this. As MySQL employees cannot write about it, the discussion has been one sided, full of speculation and justified by quotes from random people. I almost provided a few quotes myself when contacted by someone I thought was a potential MySQL customer.
I am neither a lawyer nor an economist, so I don't understand their notion of competition as applied to this issue. I wish that were clear. I don't think that the 8-year old E-Week benchmark implies anything about whether MySQL and Oracle compete. Nor do I think that a few slides from a project at Sun that failed to migrate Oracle customers to MySQL is evidence of that. Marten's letter set a high standard for the discussion. I hope others follow it.
Clearly competition isn't defined by revenue as that is something between $100M and $300M per year. The database market is much larger than that. For better or worse, MySQL has not done a good job of monetizing their users. Maybe they have not tried to do that as their value seems to be independent of their revenue. But someone has to fund the development of MySQL.
I have worked on source code for the Oracle and MySQL database servers. I have used MySQL in production. Some parts of MySQL are amazing (InnoDB, JDBC, support, docs, bug database, server uptime, ease of use, NDB) but in no way do they compete on a feature basis. I hope that never changes as MySQL would be ruined were it to become as complex as Oracle. I am sure they compete for some customers who don't need all of the features provided by Oracle. But that competition includes Sybase, Microsoft and IBM.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
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i love mysql because it's simple to understand and not like oracle it's too complex to understand and really too much money for all complexity
ReplyDelete"As MySQL employees cannot write about it, the discussion has been one sided, full of speculation and justified by quotes from random people."
ReplyDeleteI'm not an expert on how this works either, but it seems that now that the European Commission has officially stated its position, it may also defend it more than until now, so hopefully the discussion will be less one sided. Of course Oracle was quick to gear up its PR machine even more ("the gloves are off" is said to be an actual Oracle quote, can't find the link now), so maybe it will not be a balanced discussion even now.
Even if MySQL employees cannot speak up for themselves, I would like to thank everyone for the non-public support we have received during the months. Even if the debate is out of the public, many European MySQL customers have provided the EC with a strong case, and the EC has done a good investigation, and that's all that matters. The issue will not be decided in news columns or blogs. Even if this is a though period to get through, there is a lot of reason for hope now!
Mark,
actually I just wanted to comment on
"I am against the damage done by extending the uncertainty on the outcome of the deal."
You do realize that this complaint should be targeted with Oracle? Even if the official process is unfolding only now, Oracle could have closed this acquisition first day of September if they wanted. There might be many motives for Oracle to act in the uncompromising way like they do, but one problem of course is that any harm this causes to MySQL, is actually of benefit to Oracle. For all these months, Oracle has not needed to discount its prices against MySQL anymore. I'm starting to think these savings alone outweigh any losses Sun is suffering.
I know for all of you that work for the cool Web2.0 companies this sounds like a different reality, but yes, European enterprises are weighing MySQL and Oracle against each other. When I worked for Sun, I was working on replacing Oracle 4 days out of 5, believe it or not. During the past months, my former collagues have been less busy as customers don't see a point in replacing Oracle with Oracle :-(
Hopefully one day this will be over and MySQL will be resurrected stronger than before. Right now though we are pretty much at Oracle's mercy. The EC or anyone else cannot make it go any faster, only Oracle could, if they only had some motivation to. But Oracle can only prolong it that much, there is an end to this process, luckily, and even at worst it is not many months away.
henrik
Each database has its rightful place regarding their features and ease-of-use, and I appreciate both for that...
ReplyDelete> During the past months, my former collagues
ReplyDelete> have been less busy as customers don't see a
> point in replacing Oracle with Oracle :-(
Seriously? Large companies are like automakers...
Henrik,
ReplyDeleteYou need a better argument than to claim that the purchase must be blocked because some customers might switch from Oracle to MySQL. I am sure that the standard is higher than that.
Oracle continues to face price pressure whether or not MySQL is on a customer's short list. What about SQL Server, Sybase, DB2, Ingres and DB2?
Why do you assign all of the blame to Oracle? How long did it take the EC to issue the objection? There are two parties here and one of them should be granted some form of due process.
How can I judge the quality of the investigation done by the EC? What have they published?
Hi Mark
ReplyDeleteWhy do you assign all of the blame to Oracle? How long did it take the EC to issue the objection? There are two parties here and one of them should be granted some form of due process.
So if you go back to July-August, Oracle was telling us that MySQL is small, uninteresting and unimportant. What usually happens in such a situation is that the EU and Oracle would have agreed to divest MySQL and be done with it, everyone would have been happy. Except now it turns out MySQL is important to Oracle after all, so naturally they didn't do that.
Even if an official step was taken this week, Oracle and EU have of course been talking with each other all the time. The Statement of Objection is only the "last resort" for the EU since Oracle has not done any concessions. But the point is, at any point, and it commonly happens, Oracle could have resolved this rather quickly, but the EU of course cannot force Oracle to do so.
How can I judge the quality of the investigation done by the EC? What have they published?
I was under the impression that the material we (and others) submit to EU filed as non-confidential is publicly available, but apparently it is just available to Oracle. As I said, I don't know much more about this than you do, but it is my impression that in the next phase EU and Oracle will debate the case in public hearings, after which Oracle could still appeal to a court procedure.
It is a fair question of course, and you are right that right now we only have information fed by Oracle in public. Of course I don't know what evidence others have filed either, but I do know which MySQL customers (who also are Oracle customers) have filed something, so quite likely the Commission has reason to act like it does.
Henrik,
ReplyDeleteBy concession I hope you mean something other than telling Oracle they can't keep MySQL. I think concession means something else.
Oracle has made changes since this summer. They stated that they will increase funding for MySQL development. Of course, they didn't tell us what the MySQL development team would be doing (anyone want to do QA for the next Oracle release?) nor did they tell us for how long the funding would be increased.
We don't know whether Oracle has made other concessions to the EC nor do we know what the EC has sought as very little has been published.
Hi Mark
ReplyDeleteIn todays EU press conference, Neelie Kroes refused to elaborate on what concessions would be needed, so I guess it is wise for me to do the same. Similarly I realize I'm aware of some Brussels rumors that don't appear in public, and try to resist the urge to write about them, as I'm sure that wouldn't be helpful either, they are after all just rumors.
So what are we left with? You're right, there is just very little information in public right now. And we can't do much else than wait it out. Even for me who knows more than on average (but still very little and indirectly) about this. It's frustrating and we are all in pain, since we feel so passionately about MySQL.
Even for myself a few weeks ago the nervosity contributed to my stress level, I'm sure you noticed there was a day that I actually ended up offending my friends and former collagues online on a tangential topic. (I then took a short vacation and came back with batteries reloaded and apologized to Giuseppe and Lenz.)
Anyway, the only consolation right now is that this won't go on indefinitively, there is an end to the process in a couple of months.
Henrik,
ReplyDeleteThere is no consolation for Sun employees. They have been sentenced to have another lousy quarter as spending has begun to improve. MySQL users have been sentenced to a few more months of constraints on what the company can say about product release plans.
Can anyone who opposes this provide the level of detail in this document.
I have yet to read anything like that. I have read a lot of nonsense including my favorite benchmark result (the e-week benchmark), lots of speculation and proof by anecdote.
Competition has a strict definition in this issue. It is irrelevant that you were busy converting MySQL customers to Oracle or that Sun wanted to convert Oracle customers or that some random person thinks they compete.
You think it is OK for the EC to take a few months to issue an objection and then a few more months until Jan to resolve the objection? Maybe they have good reason, but by keeping that reason private a lot of us will question this.
Mark,
ReplyDeleteAt first let me say I am with you on position that I am also neither for or against merger, I think it's just about business.
But let me disagree that MySQL Organization is in good shape. I think MySQL is paralized and I've heard that from many former and current MySQL employees. As you know many excellent engineers left Sun/MySQL and many are going to do that facing the fact that they will come Oracle employees one day.
And this problem started far before announced aquisition and even before Sun purchase.
What this has to do with Oracle merger ? I think it will make situation around MySQL development even worse.
Let us take InnoDB plugin development as the model what we can expect. This is:
- no roadmap, it is unkown what feature in what release and when will be released
- no schedule. InnoDB plugin was announced 1.5 years ago, still in "early adapters" stage and no idea about when stable release will be issued
- no public development tree. you can't see diffs and changes were pushed
- very hard user contribution process
- no public bugs database. Well, you can use bugs.mysql.com for reporting bugs, but Oracle does not use it for posting internal bug
- faceless development. Look at InnoDB-plugin changelog. All features and bug where fixed by "InnoDB team". I believe InnoDB has excellent engineers Marko, Inaam, Vasil, Heikki, Michael (sorry if I miss someone, as I even do not know how many and who work right now in InnoDB team), and all of them should get credentials for their work. Well it may be weak argument and not needed to end users of product, but I personally find it very useful to get in direct conversation the developer who made that or another feature.
As for good side I can definitely mention
excellent quality of InnoDB-plugin and excellent documentation.
So projecting InnoDB-plugin development model on MySQL, I think it will declare death of previous MySQL and after merge it will be absolutelly different product. Having the fact that Oracle will own full rights on MySQL code, they even can close source code at all.
Vadim,
ReplyDeleteI may be biased because I worked for Oracle for 8 years. But I would much rather work for Oracle than for Sun.
While the leaders of both companies will make a lot of money this year, the leaders at Oracle appear to be doing a good job.
MySQL lost a few senior developers from the optimizer team. The core team is intact. Support is intact except for Domas (sorry about that). They appear to bicker less than they used to. I think they are in great shape despite difficult times. I expect a lot and I want them to be given a chance to deliver.
As I want to contribute to MySQL, I am not fond of the InnoDB development model, but I am fond of the recent rate at which InnoDB has made things better. I am fond of the MySQL development model but less fond of the rate at which MySQL has made things better. I want the InnoDB improvement rate combined with the MySQL development model. You expect to get the InnoDB development model for all of MySQL after this. I doubt that can happen given the culture at MySQL.