Re: Oracle purchases Sleepycat - is this the "other shoe"

On Thursday 16 February 2006 10:15, Steve Manes wrote:
> Leonard Soetedjo wrote:
> > Is it possible that Oracle is trying to buy MySQL to kill off other open
> > source competitor, e.g. PostgreSQL? MySQL has a strong number of users
> > and therefore it is a good deal for Oracle to buy MySQL. Then by doing
> > that, Oracle will market MySQL as the low-end alternative to their own
> > database to give a full solution to the customer. And this would slow
> > down the take up rate for other database competitor.
>
> If Oracle rebuilt MySQL to provide a seamless, plug-compatible migration
> upgrade to Oracle this might be a successful marketing strategy. But if
> a customer had to rebuild his database layer to move up to Oracle from
> MySQL, as he currently does, what would be the incentive to use MySQL
> over PG?

I've used ORM tool (propel) for PHP and it makes changing from MySQL to
PostgreSQL as easy as changing the config from mysql to pgsql. And I believe
in Java/.NET there is Hibernate and such. (Of course here I'm assuming that
a lot of projects are done in PHP and Java or .NET, AND they use ORM tools).

Sidetracking a little, I've got to admit that I'm not very sure of the impact
of ORM to databases. Some OO proponents insist on not using stored procedure
etc. unless there is a compelling reason (e.g. Martin Fowler in his book
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture). So actually a database
like MySQL4 would suffice, as much as I hate to say it.

And since MySQL already has got the upperhand in terms of marketing, Oracle
would buy MySQL to make it as the low-end alternative. Never mind the
lack/immature features in MySQL such as stored proc or trigger.

Is my argument valid or am I only seeing one side of the coin?

Regards,

Leonard Soetedjo