I got quite a response to my article on whether Oracle is Killing MySQL, including a couple of great write-ups on The Register (1, 2) on the topic. There are a few questions in this discussion that I think are worth addressing.
AWS and other cloud vendors compete, without giving anything back, what else would you expect Oracle to do ?
First, yes. I think it would be great if AWS and other cloud providers would contribute more to MySQL. We should note, though, that Oracle is a competitor for many of those companies, and there is no “level playing field” when it comes to MySQL (the fact AWS is willing on this unlevel field is another point). Contributing IP to your competitor, especially considering CLA Oracle requires might not be a great business decision. Until Oracle owns that IP, it is reasonable to expect, for Oracle to have most of the burden to maintain, improve, and promote MySQL, too.
Yes… but what if Oracle is unwilling or unable to be a great MySQL steward anymore and would rather only focus on its cloud version, similar to AWS being solely focused on its RDS and Aurora offerings? There is a solution for that – Oracle should transfer MySQL Community to Linux Foundation, Apache Foundation, or another independent entity, open up the level playing field, and focus on their Cloud (Heatwave) and Enterprise offering. Interestingly enough, there is already a precedent for that with Oracle transferring OpenOffice to Apache Software Foundation.
Another great example would be LinkerD — which was brought to CNCF by Buyant — which continues to build its extended edition – Buoyant Enterprise for LinkerD.
In this case, maintaining and growing open source MySQL will become an ecosystem problem and I’m quite sure AWS and other cloud vendors will participate more when they are not contributing to IP owned by their competitors. We can actually see it with PostgreSQL, Linux, or Kubernetes projects which have great participation from cloud vendors.
There is PostgreSQL; who needs MySQL anyway?
Indeed, PostgreSQL is a fantastic database with a great community and has been growing a lot recently. Yet there are still a lot of existing applications on MySQL and many folks who prefer MySQL, and so we need MySQL healthy for many years to come. But there is more; if MySQL were to die, we would essentially have a monopoly with popular open source relational databases, and, in my opinion, monopoly is not a good thing as it leads to stagnation and slows innovation. To have PostgreSQL to be as great as it can be it is very helpful to have healthy competition from MySQL!
Isn’t MariaDB a new, better, community-governed MySQL ?
I think MariaDB’s existence has been great at putting pressure on Oracle to invest in MySQL. We can’t know for certain “what would have been,” but chances are we would have seen more MySQL neglect earlier if not for MariaDB. Having said that, while organizationally, MariaDB is not Oracle, it is not as cleanly “community owned and governed” as PostgreSQL and does not have as broad a number of independent corporate contributors as PostgreSQL.I think there are steps MariaDB can do to really take a leadership position in MySQL space… but it deserves another article.
To sum things up
PostgreSQL and MariaDB are fantastic databases, and if not for them, the open source community would be in a very bad bind with Oracle’s current MySQL stewardship. Neither is quite a MySQL replacement today, and the best outcome for the MySQL community would be for Oracle to come to terms and work with the community to build MySQL into the best database it can be. If not, the MySQL community needs to come up with a plan B.
About the Author
Peter ZaitsevPeter managed the High Performance Group within MySQL until 2006, when he founded Percona. Peter has a Master's Degree in Computer Science and is an expert in database kernels, computer hardware, and application scaling.
Oracle announced long term support for MySQL. 8 years for each release. Good for you on getting ‘great write-ups’ for your speculative thoughts. Contributing back to the project is a great conversation and I’d encourage Percona to do so instead of publishing regular FUD pieces. We are all just trying to be better. Post the bug fixes, raise the tickets…and take credit!