Sun's Mickos: I'm OK with Monty's MySQL 5.1 rant
Michael "Monty" Widenius, original developer of the open source database MySQL, put a damper on Sun Microsystems' recent release of MySQL 5.1 with his now-infamous Nov. 29 blog post trashing the company's decision to give the update a "generally available" designation.
Widenius warned users to be "very cautious about MySQL 5.1" because "there are still many known and unknown fatal bugs in the new features that are still not addressed."
Widenius' comments sparked considerable debate last week, with some observers questioning how long he'd remain at Sun -- which bought MySQL in January for US$1 billion -- in light of such public insubordination. Sun confirmed earlier this year that Widenius was considering leaving the company, and his fellow MySQL co-founder David Axmark already has.
But a senior Sun executive says Widenius remains there and that his public criticisms reflect Sun's open-source ethics.
"I learned over many years about the benefits and the painfulness of absolute transparency in open source," said Marten Mickos, senior vice president of Sun's database group, in an interview Monday. "A little bit of debate never hurts. This is part of being an open-source company. ... people are free to blog about what they want."
In his blog post, Widenius pointed blame directly at Mickos. "We have changed the release model so that instead of focusing on quality and features our release is now defined by timeliness and features. Quality is not regarded to be that important," he wrote. "To quote Marten Mickos: 'MySQL 5.1 will be release[d] as GA in or before December because I say so.' Marten's reasons for this is that he needs something he can sell and a release marked 'GA' is much easier to sell than a release marked 'RC.'"
Mickos declined to address specific points Widenius made in the post, but said the 5.1 release is "great" and that he is "very confident" with it. The release has been downloaded more than 250,000 times in its first 10 days of general availability, according to Sun.
Meanwhile, Widenius sought to clarify his position in a follow-up comment on his blog Sunday.
Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world
On Twitter now
mysql
Powered by Twitter
Esther Schindler
If the comments are ugly, the code is ugly
claird
SVG a graphics format for 21st century
pasmith
Take Chrome OS for a test spin
Sandra Henry-Stocker
Solaris Tip: Have Your Files Changed Since Installation?
jfruh
Android fragments vs. the iPhone monolith
mikelgan
What Gizmodo missed about the Pro WX Wireless USB disk drive
Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325
Join the conversation here
Quick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.
Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.
2 approaches
PostgreSQL values correctness over speed. MySQL values (and always has valued) speed, whether time to release or runtime, over correctness of any sort. MySQL mailing lists and forums are replete with complaints of silent failures, silent corruption, silent fallback to non-ACID-compliant backends, incompatible changes in minor version updates, etc.Here's a great anecdote from Weinberg:
...
"And how long does _your_ program take?" he asked--emphasizing the possessive.
"That varies with the input," was the reply, "but on average, about ten seconds per card."
"Aha," was the triumphant reply. "But _my_ program takes only one second per card."
The members of the audience--who had, after all, all contributed to the one-second version--seemed relieved. But our hero, who was rather young and naive, was not put down by this remark. Instead, he calmly observed, "But your program doesn't work. If the program doesn't have to work, I can write one that takes one millisecond per card--and that's faster than our card reader."
...
I don't know why anyone ever bothered with MySQL when PostgreSQL exists.
I'm with jjgorsky on that.
I'm with jjgorsky on that. MySQL is fine if you just want a little toy to play around with, or if you're just running some non-critical webserver. Otherwise, why would you mess around with it? Just go PostgreSQL and have a good reliable enterprise class database.Re: Speed
Re: PostgreSQL values correctness over speed.If you are using a transactional DB (InnoDB) Postgres is not only more correct it is also faster for most things I've done.