Wednesday, July 14, 2010

MySQL Roadmap from Oracle

Few days back I was going through this article on a website which talked about Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate architect's message at O'Reilly MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, California. The oracle chief architect took the stage with a simple message : "MySQL matters to Oracle"

Performance boost, as well as several other planned enhancements, will be included in both the community and commercial editions of MySQL. However some features like hot backup, will be only in the commercial edition of MySQL.

While Screven said that Oracle wants to run MySQL definitely as a business to make money, he emphasized that he and others at the company liked the way the open source community edition made it easy for people to start projects.
He also said that "We're really focused on ensuring that MySQL becomes a better product and appeals to our customers. What we're fundamentally selling here is support."

The article can be found here

Although I do believe what Screven says about the future of MySQL that it will stay open source. But there were some reds I noticed ...

Firstly, how long will MySQL stay open source given that Oracle is looking at ways MySQL can be profitable to the company.
Secondly, the biggest problem faced by open source community is support in itself. So when Oracle says that it will be selling support then the chances of open source community getting technical support within budget diminishes.

Although the company maintains that main features will always be part of the community edition but will this sustain the competition from it's enterprize edition counterpart ?

I think these are some of the thoughts that provoked some ex-employees of MySQL and community members to create forked versions of the MySQL core tool. For example MariaDB and Drizzle both are experimenting with different data storage engines and other enhancements.

Just thinking!

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