Gary Kline wrote:
Thanks for the heads-up, MAtthew. I'm much too slow to get
all the machinations re which corporation is diddling which
corporation or other entity (like us). Did not know that
mysql was actually owned by Sun. I'd ask if there are any
free and open databases, but what db stuff I have is invested
heavily with mysql. So v 60 is out. Do you know, off-chance,
which versions are actively being hacked on? Nothing mission
critical--yet--but I think v51 is the best bet for now.
Well, what will eventually happen to MySQL is as yet unclear. It's too popular and too widespread for Oracle to just kill it, so my best guess is that they'll keep it on as an open source type project, but they'll treat it as a means of getting in the door to try and sell Oracle support in a lot of places. Which implies that any technology transfer will be mostly from MySQL to Oracle and precious little in the other direction, so that the commercial version of Oracle will maintain a technological edge.In the mean time, a bunch of die-hard MySQL people have forked a new instantiation of that project which isn't under the same commercial
constraints: see http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB Active development is mostly occurring on MySQL 5.1 and 5.4 -- not sure where 6.0 is going although they did have plenty of development goals other than 'not get borged by Oracle'. But of course, there is the technically better, almost certainly faster at real world tasks, but less optimised for noddy benchmarks option: PostgreSQL. It's BSD licenced, and while there are commercially supported variants, the core development team and the intellectual property are not structured in a way to put them at any risk of being gobbled up by some mega-corporation. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate Kent, CT11 9PW
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