MySQL not doing so well in Sun's hands

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/27/mysql_slowing_down/

MySQL, the lovable little database engine that could - for reasonable
values of could - is starting to feel the pain of being an open source
project distributed by a large company.

With a slower release cycle, community contributions are having a hard
time making it into the mainline codebase, and an illicit market for
patches and forks is emerging.

Drizzle, a slimmed-down version of MySQL started by MySQL director of
architecture Brian Aker, promises the need for a database "optimized for
cloud and net applications".

Translated for engineers, Drizzle will allegedly take better advantage
of multi-core CPUs, so your 8-core Amazon EC2 instance will serve a web
app database just a bit faster. That is, when it's production ready.

Not all contributions are so sweeping. There are so many smaller patches
to MySQL and related software like InnoDB that the OurDelta project has
sprung up to aggregate them all into a single build.

Running an OurDelta build in production is a bit like straddling a
rocket engine that's eerily marked "use at your own risk". It's really
only a last-ditch effort for solving a performance problem.

MySQL wonk Jeremy Zawodny recently attracted some publicity when he
wondered out loud why all this was necessary. It appears that since
being acquired by Sun Microsystems, MySQL's process has been slowed by a
30,000-person bureaucracy, and the open source community has the
patience of a six year old.

Any sufficiently large open source project will have forks, so it's no
surprise that it's happened to MySQL. If OurDelta or Drizzle gain
significant ground over the mainline build, then MySQL will fit
perfectly in Sun's target market: large companies with money to burn.
The rest of us will use what comes with our Linux installation.

This is the same lesson that Debian hasn't yet learned from Ubuntu: fast
and good-enough always beats slow and correct. ®

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Ironic really, because it looks to me that lately IDS seems to be
cracking out innovation at a rate of knots. Boring old IBM doing
something better than exciting open source? Surely not! )

--
Cheers,
Obnoxio The Clown

http://obotheclown.blogspot.com