Re: Ammunition

From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne(at)acm(dot)org>
To: pgsql-advocacy(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Ammunition
Date: 2003-08-14 02:39:21
Message-ID: 60fzk5klnq.fsf@dev6.int.libertyrms.info
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scrappy(at)postgresql(dot)org (The Hermit Hacker) writes:
> On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Christopher Browne wrote:
>
>> pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us (Bruce Momjian) writes:
>> > To me, the big MySQL issue is that it isn't an open source
>> > development project, just a company that distributes code via open
>> > source. They will never be able to keep up with us.
>>
>> I found the quote from Scott McNealy most ironic:
>>
>> http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,78443,00.html
>>
>> "If you want to save...money, make the default database MySQL. It's
>> free, it's bundled [with Sun's Solaris software], you've got the whole
>> open-source community working on making it better. If Yahoo and Google
>> can run their entire operations on MySQL, then certainly there's a
>> huge chunk of your operations that could run on it as well."
>
> I had a chat with some of the Google guys when I went to LinuxWorld in New
> York 2 years back ... unless something has changed dramatically, Google
> has their own backend engine, and it isn't/wasn't MySQL ... and has Yahoo
> been using Google for awhile now?
>
> Can anyone confirm whether Google is, in fact, using MySQL?

I'm sure they do, somewhere.

The staunchest PostgreSQL shop might have a MySQL instance kicking
around somewhere on which to run Bugzilla, because the port of it
which runs on PostgreSQL is not quite ready for the light of day,
whilst I'll bet there are Linux and/or BSD distributions that include
Bugzilla packaged to run atop MySQL.

It would be totally unremarkable for the Google guys to have a copy of
Bugzilla or some other such application running atop MySQL.

Supposing their accounting software runs on (Faircom SQL| Oracle|
Sybase| Something Else), they might well have a few licenses of those
databases kicking around somewhere.

But from what I hear, the "text database" software that's the root of
their business is HIGHLY custom stuff that they wrote themselves.

Every software vendor out there will try to claim Major Companies as
being customers. American Airlines gets cited heavily for this by
every small software shop out there, which merely implies two things:

1. They are a company with ~100K employees, some of whom buy
software and tell the vendor "I work for AMR."

2. Down in the basement, there are probably crates of disused
copies of all sorts of stuff.

They nonetheless use DB/2, Teradata, and Oracle for a whole lot of
their systems.
--
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http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/nonrdbms.html
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