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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Oracle buys Sun !!

OK, I think you already know this. But it's not the news I'm talking about. I'm talking about the implications.

I did not use Java technology a lot, I admire it, but I cannot consider myself as a Java developer. However, having Java technology in our world and it's competition with Microsoft's .net framework is a healthy thing. It gives us options.
Some Java developers were worried after news about the deal has spread. I think that Oracle + Java has been and will stay a good choice to build enterprise applications. Maybe the future will carry news about better and better RIA applications built with Java platform.




What I really care about and made me worried is the future of MySQL, which is the most popular open source database that has a free community edition.
How is this related to MySQL? Here is the story:

MySQL has a pluggable database engine architecture. So it has many database engines to choose from, and you deal with them all using the same SQL dialect.
One famous engine is the InnoDB engine, which is transactional and high performance database engine that was widely used by MySQL users. InnoDB was developed by Innobase, a Finnish company.
Oracle acquired Innobase, which caused worries about the future of the transactional engine. Sun bought MySQL. And MySQL released the Falcon storage engine.



Now, what is the future of MySQL under the control of Oracle, the database giant? The problem is not only that Oracle may kill MySQL gradually (I think it won't do it directly). But is that MySQL engineers started to leave Sun after Oracle's deal. (more about this in this article).

So. Big fishes eat small fishes. It's the turn of open source advocates and MySQL users to have their word.

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