Re: off to the farm to start new career ...
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 13:28:35 +0300
Message-ID: <4c8a0853$0$12191$9b536df3_at_news.fv.fi>
(This is mostly about corporate politics, i.e.. off topic, please bear with me.)
On 09/09/10 18:32, Mladen Gogala wrote:
....
> As a matter of fact, I tried pushing for DB2 because I am still
> suspicious of open source databases, especially after the MySQL story.
On the other hand licensing is such that you may use your existing DBs forever and most of the support is community driven anyway (applies, in reality, to MS or Oracle, too), so the impact of the owner changes aren't so major as in the case of a commercial product. If MySQL were a commercial product (actually: closed source), I'd be really worried and new projects would search alternatives.
Also, if the product is good, there will be maintainers/upgraders as long as there are users. Of course, the quality of maintainers is unknown until they produce something.
I've nothing against DB2 and current IBM as a company seems at least palatable compared to the old one (they also seem to like open source quite a lot). DB2 is a solid product and I think I'd also choose it rather than Postgress for a new big project. Maybe it's just me.
On the other hand, as a DBA I'm slightly suspicious of _all_ DB-products: Shoddy mock-ups put together before deadline as release dates are always defined by marketing, i.e.. people who have no idea of quality nor how to make it. ;)
Oracle as a company is (IMHO) on the slippery path, there are many signs of marketing-driven company (loud mouthed CEO is one of those) and that's always bad for the programming quality and eventually the users.
Also old programming rule: "Every program grows until it exceeds the abilities of the people developing it". So far there haven't been many exceptions from this rule.
> MySQL was turned into a Cinderella of the database world, bought out by
> the evil stepmother. Unless a beautiful prince comes by, MySQL is f**ed.
MySQL as a product seems to be doomed, yes. I couldn't imagine anything else than slaughtering at the moment. Especially when Ellison decided to kill many other open source projects going on also.
> So far, there are new forks of MySQL, which can be translated into
> kissing frogs, without much to show for.
Many (almost all of the key persons) of the original developers (before Sun bought them) left Sun/Oracle as soon as Oracle bought Sun, so they are free to develop new forks.
These guys made MySQL because they didn't like Oracle at all (as a company), so I'm quite sure that there will be new product fairly soon, of course called something else.
Also Ellison seems to lose contact with reality, his latest comments on Hurd/HP-hassle were quite weird (even if Hurd is his personal friend) and even weirder was the decision to hire Hurd, a person who didn't get anything done in HP, except that all the qualified personnel left, very bad thing for a technology company. Not something that you or me would put in our CVs.
Is Ellison going down the same path as Ballmer?: "When there is criticism inside the company, kick the critics out, hire only yes-men instead and do not change anything, because you know that you are always right!"
I do know that Ellison is a greedy man, licensing prices for small installations is absurd and even more absurd for development tools and that means that there are very small amount of new Oracle users (or none) at any given time. No new users -> no future in the long term (10-30 years).
Is Ellison in the "steal everything you can and run"-phase in Oracle? Long term policy seems to be non-existent.
Well, we live interesting times.
> Unfortunately, some people that have more sway than me are avid magazine
> readers and believe that open source is the way of the future.
I'd see it as a sliding scale of solutions for some problems and some situations. The company I work for, uses open source whenever we can and we have been mostly happy of this decision. Immediate major impact on license administration: We haven't one. Or license fees.
On the other hand, the amount of experience and knowledge needed to operate is somewhat higher than commercial products, many products do the job but aren't very user friendly or fine-tuned. That's a major cost sometimes, fortunately not too often. Most of this is internal, our clients have no idea what tools we are using and we are not advertising those either, unless someone asks.
We use often Apache, PHP, Tomcat and some DB, often MySQL as databases mostly are very small, combination that's easy to apply on whatever platform you like to use.
But I do agree on that that most PHBs read too many magazines without any source criticism. Especially if those are glossy high profile magazines for "top management".
> What I like about commercial databases is that there is someone to call
and yell
> at when something bad happens.
Unfortunately, more often than not, that's the only thing that happens. ;)
It helps anyway, I have to admit that.
-- Tuomas - VWs: '63 typ14, '65 typ34 & '61 typ2Received on Fri Sep 10 2010 - 05:28:35 CDT