Thread

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@g2switchworks.com> — 2005-10-08T15:31:30Z

(This is via Exchange Web client, I apologize in advance for any htmlitudeiness of this message)

What it comes down to is this.  MySQL is dual licensed.  You can use the GPL version, or the commercial version.  In order to sell the commercially licensed version, MySQL must have the rights to all the code in their base.  So, in order for MySQL to sell a commercail version of MySQL with innodb support, they have to pay innobase a bit to include it, or rip it out.

So, now Oracle can just raise the price high enough that either the commercial version of MySQL has to go up to cover the price, or they are forced to remove it.  If MySQL makes the choice to remove it from the commercial version, they will likely take it out of the GPL version as well, since they likely don't want the commercially licensed version to be the red headed step child of the GPL version, since their business plan relies on convincing people they need the commercial license as much as possible.


-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org on behalf of Andreas Kretschmer
Sent: Sat 10/8/2005 3:34 AM
To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase
 
Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> schrieb:
> Ultimately, MySQL should drop InnoDB.

http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?3,48400,48400#msg-48400

InnoDB is GPL. But, i'm also confused.

My guess: a fork in the future.



Regards, Andreas
-- 
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unintentional side effect. (Linus Torvalds)
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Re: Oracle buys Innobase

felix@crowfix.com — 2005-10-08T21:11:54Z

On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 10:31:30AM -0500, Scott Marlowe wrote:

> What it comes down to is this.  MySQL is dual licensed.  You can use
> the GPL version, or the commercial version.  In order to sell the
> commercially licensed version, MySQL must have the rights to all the
> code in their base.  So, in order for MySQL to sell a commercail
> version of MySQL with innodb support, they have to pay innobase a
> bit to include it, or rip it out.

I don't understand.  If both MySQL and Innodb are GPL licensed,
commercial or not should make no difference, and they can add all the
GPL changes they want o the last Innodb GPL release.

What am I missing?

-- 
            ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._.
     Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / felix@crowfix.com
  GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E  6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933
I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Martin Marques <martin@bugs.unl.edu.ar> — 2005-10-08T21:49:45Z

El Sáb 08 Oct 2005 18:11, felix@crowfix.com escribió:
> On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 10:31:30AM -0500, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> 
> > What it comes down to is this.  MySQL is dual licensed.  You can use
> > the GPL version, or the commercial version.  In order to sell the
> > commercially licensed version, MySQL must have the rights to all the
> > code in their base.  So, in order for MySQL to sell a commercail
> > version of MySQL with innodb support, they have to pay innobase a
> > bit to include it, or rip it out.
> 
> I don't understand.  If both MySQL and Innodb are GPL licensed,
> commercial or not should make no difference, and they can add all the
> GPL changes they want o the last Innodb GPL release.
> 
> What am I missing?

They can't enforce a commercial licence over a GPL aplication.

--
select 'mmarques' || '@' || 'unl.edu.ar' AS email;
---------------------------------------------------------
Martín Marqués          |   Programador, DBA
Centro de Telemática	|     Administrador
               Universidad Nacional
                    del Litoral
---------------------------------------------------------

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2005-10-08T21:56:57Z

felix@crowfix.com writes:
> I don't understand.  If both MySQL and Innodb are GPL licensed,
> commercial or not should make no difference, and they can add all the
> GPL changes they want o the last Innodb GPL release.

> What am I missing?

MySQL AB wants to make money by selling non-GPL versions of MySQL.
They can certainly dual-license MySQL itself, because they own it
outright, but they could not ship InnoDB as part of a non-GPL-license
MySQL sale without InnoDB's (and now Oracle's) permission.  So they've
got a financial problem with this.

			regards, tom lane

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@pervasive.com> — 2005-10-08T22:01:50Z

On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 02:11:54PM -0700, felix@crowfix.com wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 10:31:30AM -0500, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> 
> > What it comes down to is this.  MySQL is dual licensed.  You can use
> > the GPL version, or the commercial version.  In order to sell the
> > commercially licensed version, MySQL must have the rights to all the
> > code in their base.  So, in order for MySQL to sell a commercail
> > version of MySQL with innodb support, they have to pay innobase a
> > bit to include it, or rip it out.
> 
> I don't understand.  If both MySQL and Innodb are GPL licensed,
> commercial or not should make no difference, and they can add all the
> GPL changes they want o the last Innodb GPL release.
> 
> What am I missing?

MySQL isn't GPL, it's a modified GPL. But the real issue is that they
can't use the GPL licensed InnoDB in their commercial product. They have
to obtain a commercial license for that. And I suspect Oracle's going to
want more than they can afford for that license.

Though AFAIK there wouldn't be anything illegal about someone with a
commercial license of MySQL using the GPL'd version of InnoDB... but of
course if they did that they'd have GPL'd software again, so no reason
to pay for the commercial license of MySQL.

This is the first time I can think of where software being GPL'd might
actually hurt the open-source community.
-- 
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Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Matthew Terenzio <matt@jobsforge.com> — 2005-10-08T22:26:55Z

On Oct 8, 2005, at 5:11 PM, felix@crowfix.com wrote:

> I don't understand.  If both MySQL and Innodb are GPL licensed,
> commercial or not should make no difference, and they can add all the
> GPL changes they want o the last Innodb GPL release.

MySQL owns their code so they can release it with whatever license they 
want.
Since they don't own the Innodb code they can't include it in a 
commercially licensed product.

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Mitch Pirtle <mitch.pirtle@gmail.com> — 2005-10-08T23:35:11Z

On 10/8/05, felix@crowfix.com <felix@crowfix.com> wrote:
>
> I don't understand.  If both MySQL and Innodb are GPL licensed,
> commercial or not should make no difference, and they can add all the
> GPL changes they want o the last Innodb GPL release.

They can only do the GPL stuff in the GPL-licensed MySQL; and they
cannot incorporate someone else's GPL works in a proprietary (non-GPL)
commercial release.

This basically means that InnoDB table support must come out of the
commercial MySQL.

-- Mitch

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Mitch Pirtle <mitch.pirtle@gmail.com> — 2005-10-08T23:40:53Z

On 10/8/05, Mitch Pirtle <mitch.pirtle@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This basically means that InnoDB table support must come out of the
> commercial MySQL.

For that matter, I'm not sure they can release MySQL under a
commercial license while incorporating 3rd party GPL works, without
the express permission of the copyright holders for those included
works.

Whatever deal they used to have just got changed, that's for sure.

-- Mitch

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Jason Earl <jearl@xmission.com> — 2005-10-09T00:07:20Z

felix@crowfix.com writes:

> On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 10:31:30AM -0500, Scott Marlowe wrote:
>
>> What it comes down to is this.  MySQL is dual licensed.  You can use
>> the GPL version, or the commercial version.  In order to sell the
>> commercially licensed version, MySQL must have the rights to all the
>> code in their base.  So, in order for MySQL to sell a commercail
>> version of MySQL with innodb support, they have to pay innobase a
>> bit to include it, or rip it out.
>
> I don't understand.  If both MySQL and Innodb are GPL licensed,
> commercial or not should make no difference, and they can add all
> the GPL changes they want o the last Innodb GPL release.

Yes, that is correct, MySQL can still distribute a GPLed version of
MySQL that includes InnoDB no matter what Oracle might do.  However,
MySQL AB's current business strategy relies heavily on being able to
sell MySQL under a commercial license.  If Oracle changes the deal
that MySQL AB has with InnoBase then it will be impossible for MySQL
AB to sell a version of MySQL with support for InnoDB tables under a
commercial license.  All of MySQL's fancy new features revolve around
the far more capable InnoDB tables.  Without that table type MySQL
reverts right back to the toy it was at version 3.2.  MyISAM tables
lack ACID transactions, row level locking, hot backup ability, and
basically everything else you would want out of a database.

Oracle now has MySQL AB over a barrel.  I imagine that when it comes
time to renegotiate the InnoBase license next year that the balance of
power in that relationship will shift dramatically.

> What am I missing?

What you are missing is that MySQL AB the company and MySQL the
database are two different things.  MySQL the database will still be
distributable under the GPL, but even MySQL AB isn't going to be able
to distribute MySQL with the InnoDB table type under anything but the
GPL if Oracle yanks MySQL AB's license.  Of course, it's entirely
possible that Oracle isn't planning to torpedo MySQL and that the
InnoBase/MySQL AB relationship will remain unchanged, but this news
has got to make MySQL AB's commercial customers nervous.

Jason

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> — 2005-10-09T00:35:25Z

felix@crowfix.com writes:
> On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 10:31:30AM -0500, Scott Marlowe wrote:
>
>> What it comes down to is this.  MySQL is dual licensed.  You can use
>> the GPL version, or the commercial version.  In order to sell the
>> commercially licensed version, MySQL must have the rights to all the
>> code in their base.  So, in order for MySQL to sell a commercail
>> version of MySQL with innodb support, they have to pay innobase a
>> bit to include it, or rip it out.
>
> I don't understand.  If both MySQL and Innodb are GPL licensed,
> commercial or not should make no difference, and they can add all the
> GPL changes they want o the last Innodb GPL release.
>
> What am I missing?

If they do not hold a fairly unrestricted license to *resell* InnoDB,
then MySQL AB would be unable to sell "traditional proprietary
commercial licenses" to the combination of MySQL and InnoDB, which is
the way that they actually _make money_.

Based on the comments in Oracle's press release, it appears that MySQL
AB *does* have some form of contract with InnoDB Oy Inc to resell
InnoDB, but that contract expires some time next year.

If the contract is not renewed, then MySQL AB would only be permitted
to link MySQL (tm) to InnoDB under the conditions of the GPL, which
would mean that MySQL AB could only distribute a MySQL(tm)/InnoDB(tm)
combination under the conditions of the GPL.   

This would essentially *destroy* their revenue model, which is
predicated on the notion of selling people a "traditional proprietary
license" to MySQL+InnoDB on the basis that they should be fearful of
GPL-licensed software as it always forces you to release your code
"for free."  (There's some truth to this, but possibly not as much as
MySQL AB would have you believe.)
-- 
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Re: Oracle buys Innobase

felix@crowfix.com — 2005-10-09T00:49:21Z

On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 02:11:54PM -0700, felix@crowfix.com wrote:
> 
> What am I missing?

[ many answers ]

Ahhh ... I did not realize they were selling a commercial version with
a dual license.  I had thought they were selling support contracts.

I confess I find this weird too.  I can't see why someone wouild want
to distribute their own private label version of MySQL, unless they
were making significant changes, and then I can't see why anyone would
want to buy such a version.  But I have met many people, not just
corporate types, who think $0 = worthless, and $$ not as good as
$$$$$$, even for the exact same piece of gear.

-- 
            ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._.
     Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / felix@crowfix.com
  GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E  6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933
I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Thomas F. O'Connell <tfo@sitening.com> — 2005-10-09T01:22:57Z

On Oct 8, 2005, at 6:40 PM, Mitch Pirtle wrote:

> On 10/8/05, Mitch Pirtle <mitch.pirtle@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> This basically means that InnoDB table support must come out of the
>> commercial MySQL.
>
> For that matter, I'm not sure they can release MySQL under a
> commercial license while incorporating 3rd party GPL works, without
> the express permission of the copyright holders for those included
> works.
>
> Whatever deal they used to have just got changed, that's for sure.
>
> -- Mitch

All of which seems to beg the question: why did not MySQL buy  
Innobase themselves? As far as I've read, the terms of the  
transaction were not disclosed. I guess it's possible that MySQL  
didn't have the financial reach to pull off the deal.

--
Thomas F. O'Connell
Co-Founder, Information Architect
Sitening, LLC

Strategic Open Source: Open Your i™

http://www.sitening.com/
110 30th Avenue North, Suite 6
Nashville, TN 37203-6320
615-469-5150
615-469-5151 (fax)

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Mike Nolan <nolan@gw.tssi.com> — 2005-10-09T01:54:55Z

> All of which seems to beg the question: why did not MySQL buy  
> Innobase themselves? As far as I've read, the terms of the  
> transaction were not disclosed. I guess it's possible that MySQL  
> didn't have the financial reach to pull off the deal.

Maybe they didn't think it was necessary.  In any event, they're far from 
the first (or last) company to underestmate the aggressive business tactics 
of Oracle, which isn't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.

My guess is that the people at Oracle looked at the number of ISPs who
offer their customers MySQL database support and saw a market to tap.
Oracle's tried to tap the 'small database server' market before, badly.

If the folks at MySQL AB are smart, they may be considering selling out 
to Oracle too, before they get left out in the cold.  

Are there any lessons to be learned from this with regards to PostgreSQL?
--
Mike Nolan

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Mitch Pirtle <mitch.pirtle@gmail.com> — 2005-10-09T02:24:29Z

On 10/8/05, Thomas F. O'Connell <tfo@sitening.com> wrote:
>
> All of which seems to beg the question: why did not MySQL buy
> Innobase themselves? As far as I've read, the terms of the
> transaction were not disclosed. I guess it's possible that MySQL
> didn't have the financial reach to pull off the deal.

Well, if I was Oracle and had a sneaky idea, I would *first* get
Innobase Oy under NDA, and *then* start acquisition talks...

Oracle has done enough business over the years to know that a bidding
war would have put them in a horrible position, possibly an
unrecoverable one. The somewhat muted reaction from MySQL leaves me
the impression that they were blindsided.

OTOH, this news doesn't exactly make MySQL look good, so it is also
natural for them to downplay the situation. Maybe they have had
contingency plans all along and just haven't progressed enough with
them to make any formal announcements.

-- Mitch, waiting for the movie, liking the idea of Danny DeVito
playing Larry Ellison

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Marc G. Fournier <scrappy@postgresql.org> — 2005-10-09T02:34:34Z

On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, Mike Nolan wrote:

>> All of which seems to beg the question: why did not MySQL buy
>> Innobase themselves? As far as I've read, the terms of the
>> transaction were not disclosed. I guess it's possible that MySQL
>> didn't have the financial reach to pull off the deal.
>
> Maybe they didn't think it was necessary.  In any event, they're far from
> the first (or last) company to underestmate the aggressive business tactics
> of Oracle, which isn't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
>
> My guess is that the people at Oracle looked at the number of ISPs who
> offer their customers MySQL database support and saw a market to tap.
> Oracle's tried to tap the 'small database server' market before, badly.
>
> If the folks at MySQL AB are smart, they may be considering selling out
> to Oracle too, before they get left out in the cold.
>
> Are there any lessons to be learned from this with regards to PostgreSQL?

IMHO, not really ... nobody *owes* the PostgreSQL code base, and we aren't 
reliant on any third parties for key parts of the server, so Oracle would 
essentially have to go after the commercial vendors themselves, and even 
going after them wouldn't buy them *that* much, I wouldn't think ...

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Jason Earl <jearl@xmission.com> — 2005-10-09T03:02:12Z

felix@crowfix.com writes:

> On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 02:11:54PM -0700, felix@crowfix.com wrote:
>> 
>> What am I missing?
>
> [ many answers ]
>
> Ahhh ... I did not realize they were selling a commercial version with
> a dual license.  I had thought they were selling support contracts.
>
> I confess I find this weird too.  I can't see why someone wouild
> want to distribute their own private label version of MySQL, unless
> they were making significant changes, and then I can't see why
> anyone would want to buy such a version.  But I have met many
> people, not just corporate types, who think $0 = worthless, and $$
> not as good as $$$$$$, even for the exact same piece of gear.

That's part of the reason that MySQL AB went around to all of the
MySQL database adaptor guys and hired them and changed the license on
them to the GPL.  There were lots of people that wanted to include a
database with their software and LGPLed drivers let them do that even
if the database itself was under the GPL.  Now with GPLed drivers for
MySQL if you distribute your application you either need a commercial
license of MySQL or you need to GPL your application.  MySQL made a
pretty penny convincing application writers that they needed a
commercial license of MySQL if their application wasn't distributed
under the GPL.

It wasn't about support contracts per se, but rather about being able
to include an inexpensive database with a commercial application.  In
some ways that actually shouldn't be a problem since the drivers are
the part get gets "linked" with the commercial application, and they
are still owned by MySQL AB.  However, it's going to look funny if
MySQL AB has to offer MySQL itself under the GPL in order to include
InnoDB tables and they simply sell the database drivers under a
commercial license.

Any way you look at it, there are interesting times ahead for MySQL
AB.  Personally I think that it is just Karma.  After years of
disinformation they are getting what they deserve.

Jason

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Uwe C. Schroeder <uwe@oss4u.com> — 2005-10-09T03:25:05Z

On Saturday 08 October 2005 17:35, Chris Browne wrote:
> felix@crowfix.com writes:
> > On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 10:31:30AM -0500, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> >> What it comes down to is this.  MySQL is dual licensed.  You can use
> >> the GPL version, or the commercial version.  In order to sell the
> >> commercially licensed version, MySQL must have the rights to all the
> >> code in their base.  So, in order for MySQL to sell a commercail
> >> version of MySQL with innodb support, they have to pay innobase a
> >> bit to include it, or rip it out.
> >
> > I don't understand.  If both MySQL and Innodb are GPL licensed,
> > commercial or not should make no difference, and they can add all the
> > GPL changes they want o the last Innodb GPL release.
> >
> > What am I missing?
>
> If they do not hold a fairly unrestricted license to *resell* InnoDB,
> then MySQL AB would be unable to sell "traditional proprietary
> commercial licenses" to the combination of MySQL and InnoDB, which is
> the way that they actually _make money_.
>
> Based on the comments in Oracle's press release, it appears that MySQL
> AB *does* have some form of contract with InnoDB Oy Inc to resell
> InnoDB, but that contract expires some time next year.
>
> If the contract is not renewed, then MySQL AB would only be permitted
> to link MySQL (tm) to InnoDB under the conditions of the GPL, which
> would mean that MySQL AB could only distribute a MySQL(tm)/InnoDB(tm)
> combination under the conditions of the GPL.
>
> This would essentially *destroy* their revenue model, which is
> predicated on the notion of selling people a "traditional proprietary
> license" to MySQL+InnoDB on the basis that they should be fearful of
> GPL-licensed software as it always forces you to release your code
> "for free."  (There's some truth to this, but possibly not as much as
> MySQL AB would have you believe.)


Didn't MySQL AB acquire SAPdb (which was Adabas D before)? AFAIK (and you're 
welcome to correct me since I might very well be wrong) SAPdb supports 
transactions and foreign keys. If that's the case MySQL AB might  be in a 
position to offer the bells and whistles without InnoDB support if they work 
out the deficiencies of SAPdb.


-- 
	UC

--
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Phone:  +1 650 872 2425		San Bruno, CA 94066
Cell:   +1 650 302 2405		United States
Fax:    +1 650 872 2417

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> — 2005-10-09T03:34:15Z

tfo@sitening.com ("Thomas F. O'Connell") writes:
> On Oct 8, 2005, at 6:40 PM, Mitch Pirtle wrote:
>
>> On 10/8/05, Mitch Pirtle <mitch.pirtle@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> This basically means that InnoDB table support must come out of the
>>> commercial MySQL.
>>
>> For that matter, I'm not sure they can release MySQL under a
>> commercial license while incorporating 3rd party GPL works, without
>> the express permission of the copyright holders for those included
>> works.
>>
>> Whatever deal they used to have just got changed, that's for sure.
>
> All of which seems to beg the question: why did not MySQL buy
> Innobase themselves? As far as I've read, the terms of the
> transaction were not disclosed. I guess it's possible that MySQL
> didn't have the financial reach to pull off the deal.

It is interesting that MySQL AB did not put some option into their
original deal with InnoDB that would make it easy for them to do a
buyout of the code in case "something naughty might happen."

If I were making my product dependent on [X], I'd want to be careful
to assure myself that I could continue to have access to [X];
according to what I see in the Oracle statement, it doesn't appear as
though there was anything more specific than a contract ending some
time next year.

Mind you, it is not public what goes away in 2006.  It is possible
that MySQL AB has a more-or-less perpetual license to use InnoDB as it
stands today, in which case it would be entirely possible that they
would fork the code base, and maintain the "MySQL version of InnoDB"
themselves.  Continuing access to the present version would represent
a reasonable "option" for MySQL AB...

In any case, there are doubtless a few lawyers in Europe that are
pretty busy this weekend :-).
-- 
output = ("cbbrowne" "@" "acm.org")
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/linuxxian.html
I just removed the instructions in MC:COMMON;LINS > which specify that
it should be installed on AI.  We'll certainly  miss that machine, and
probably spend the rest of our lives fixing programs that mention it.

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Matthew Terenzio <matt@jobsforge.com> — 2005-10-09T03:50:29Z

On Oct 8, 2005, at 10:34 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:

>> Are there any lessons to be learned from this with regards to 
>> PostgreSQL?

Like Marc said, doesn't seem to be a worry to the Postgres community . 
. .

Unless this is all really an Oracle ploy to grab the competition to the 
their real future fear . . . PostgreSQL X   : )

Seriously though, whereas MySQL's ease of use was a draw to the 
burgeoning web designers-turned-PHP codies, a lot of heavy DB users 
considered and still consider Postgres the open-source alternative to 
Oracle.

When I was new to DB newbie, I followed that crowd (like the OpenACS 
folks) from Oracle to Postgres.

While this deal doesn't change the quality of MySQL at all yet, it 
could affect the evangelizing efforts of the community. It can't help, 
I wouldn't think, unless Oracle just smothers them out, which is 
possible, though not probable, since the two database's customers are 
so different and there is money to be made by keeping the DB alive.

A community would always remain to take up the torch, but the Postgres 
community builds Postgres, while the MySQL community has a different 
dynamic entirely.

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

David Fetter <david@fetter.org> — 2005-10-09T03:55:31Z

On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 10:24:29PM -0400, Mitch Pirtle wrote:

> -- Mitch, waiting for the movie, liking the idea of Danny DeVito
> playing Larry Ellison

So Frank Vincent is playing Monty? ;)

Cheers,
D
-- 
David Fetter david@fetter.org http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 510 893 6100   mobile: +1 415 235 3778

Remember to vote!

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@pervasive.com> — 2005-10-09T03:59:04Z

On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 10:24:29PM -0400, Mitch Pirtle wrote:
> On 10/8/05, Thomas F. O'Connell <tfo@sitening.com> wrote:
> >
> > All of which seems to beg the question: why did not MySQL buy
> > Innobase themselves? As far as I've read, the terms of the
> > transaction were not disclosed. I guess it's possible that MySQL
> > didn't have the financial reach to pull off the deal.
> 
> Well, if I was Oracle and had a sneaky idea, I would *first* get
> Innobase Oy under NDA, and *then* start acquisition talks...
> 
> Oracle has done enough business over the years to know that a bidding
> war would have put them in a horrible position, possibly an
> unrecoverable one. The somewhat muted reaction from MySQL leaves me
> the impression that they were blindsided.

How would a bidding war put them in a horrible position? Whatever they
paid for Innobase is pocket-change. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that
Larry paid more for his jet than he/Oracle paid for Innobase.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Matthew Terenzio <matt@jobsforge.com> — 2005-10-09T03:59:35Z

On Oct 8, 2005, at 11:25 PM, Uwe C. Schroeder wrote:

> Didn't MySQL AB acquire SAPdb (which was Adabas D before)? AFAIK (and 
> you're
> welcome to correct me since I might very well be wrong) SAPdb supports
> transactions and foreign keys. If that's the case MySQL AB might  be 
> in a
> position to offer the bells and whistles without InnoDB support if 
> they work
> out the deficiencies of SAPdb.

Or maybe SQLite?

I was looking for some other options and saw this page. It look like 
the author mistakenly calls PostgreSQL GPL'd.

http://linas.org/linux/db.html

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> — 2005-10-09T04:07:08Z

uwe@oss4u.com ("Uwe C. Schroeder") writes:
> Didn't MySQL AB acquire SAPdb (which was Adabas D before)? AFAIK
> (and you're welcome to correct me since I might very well be wrong)
> SAPdb supports transactions and foreign keys. If that's the case
> MySQL AB might be in a position to offer the bells and whistles
> without InnoDB support if they work out the deficiencies of SAPdb.

They did that indeed, or at least they acquired a license to SAP-DB.
(I think SAP AG retains license as well; this is akin to the way USL
sold SysV licenses to many vendors...)

The problems with Max-DB are twofold:

 1.  It isn't at all compatible with the "legacy" MySQL applications.

     It is essentially a database system with a similar "flavour" to
     Oracle version 7.  That's not much similar to MySQL 3.x or 4.x.

 2.  The code base was pretty old, pretty creaky, and has a *really*
     heavy learning curve.

     It was pretty famous as being *really* difficult to build; throw
     together such things as:
      - It uses a custom set of build tools that were created for a
        mainframe environment and sorta hacked into Python
      - Naming conventions for files, variables, and functions combine 
        pseudo-German with an affinity for 8 character names that are 
        anything but mnemonic.  (Think: "Germans developing on MVS.")
      - I seem to recall there being a Pascal translator to transform
        some of the code into C++...

     Doing substantial revisions to it seems unlikely.  Doing terribly
     much more than trying to keep it able to compile on a few
     platforms of interest seems unlikely.

When they announced at OSCON that MySQL 5.0 would have all of the
features essential to support SAP R/3, that fit the best theories
available as to why they took on "MaxDB", namely to figure out the
minimal set of additions needed to get MySQL to be able to host R/3.

If that be the case, then Oracle just took about the minimal action
necessary to take the wind out of their sails :-).
-- 
"cbbrowne","@","cbbrowne.com"
http://cbbrowne.com/info/linuxdistributions.html
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2005-10-09T05:30:34Z

Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> writes:
> When they announced at OSCON that MySQL 5.0 would have all of the
> features essential to support SAP R/3, that fit the best theories
> available as to why they took on "MaxDB", namely to figure out the
> minimal set of additions needed to get MySQL to be able to host R/3.

[ Trying to drag this thread back to something Postgres-related ;-) ]

Does anyone have a clear idea how far *we* are from being able to
support SAP?

			regards, tom lane

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Uwe C. Schroeder <uwe@oss4u.com> — 2005-10-09T05:50:10Z

On Saturday 08 October 2005 21:07, Chris Browne wrote:
> uwe@oss4u.com ("Uwe C. Schroeder") writes:
> > Didn't MySQL AB acquire SAPdb (which was Adabas D before)? AFAIK
> > (and you're welcome to correct me since I might very well be wrong)
> > SAPdb supports transactions and foreign keys. If that's the case
> > MySQL AB might be in a position to offer the bells and whistles
> > without InnoDB support if they work out the deficiencies of SAPdb.
>
> They did that indeed, or at least they acquired a license to SAP-DB.
> (I think SAP AG retains license as well; this is akin to the way USL
> sold SysV licenses to many vendors...)
>
> The problems with Max-DB are twofold:
>
>  1.  It isn't at all compatible with the "legacy" MySQL applications.
>
>      It is essentially a database system with a similar "flavour" to
>      Oracle version 7.  That's not much similar to MySQL 3.x or 4.x.
>
>  2.  The code base was pretty old, pretty creaky, and has a *really*
>      heavy learning curve.
>
>      It was pretty famous as being *really* difficult to build; throw
>      together such things as:
>       - It uses a custom set of build tools that were created for a
>         mainframe environment and sorta hacked into Python
>       - Naming conventions for files, variables, and functions combine
>         pseudo-German with an affinity for 8 character names that are
>         anything but mnemonic.  (Think: "Germans developing on MVS.")
>       - I seem to recall there being a Pascal translator to transform
>         some of the code into C++...


WOW - careful now. I'm german - but then, there's a reason why I immigrated to 
the US :-)

>
>      Doing substantial revisions to it seems unlikely.  Doing terribly
>      much more than trying to keep it able to compile on a few
>      platforms of interest seems unlikely.
>
> When they announced at OSCON that MySQL 5.0 would have all of the
> features essential to support SAP R/3, that fit the best theories
> available as to why they took on "MaxDB", namely to figure out the
> minimal set of additions needed to get MySQL to be able to host R/3.
>
> If that be the case, then Oracle just took about the minimal action
> necessary to take the wind out of their sails :-).


SAPdb (aka Adabas D) is something I worked with quite a while ago. And you're 
right, the naming schemes and restrictions, as well as severe 
incompatibilities with the SQL standard where one of my major reasons to drop 
that database in favor of Informix (at that time) and PostgreSQL later on.
It was kind of tough to generate explanatory table names with those kind of 
limitations. Nonetheless back then (maybe around 1993) Adabas D was a quite 
powerful and considerably cheap alternative to anything serious at the market 
- and it was easy to sell to customers (back in germany) just because this 
was THE database powering SAP R/3.

But you may be right - considering what the codebase of SAPdb must look like 
it's probably unlikely MySQL AB can make any considerable improvements in the 
time available.

	UC

--
Open Source Solutions 4U, LLC	2570 Fleetwood Drive
Phone:  +1 650 872 2425		San Bruno, CA 94066
Cell:   +1 650 302 2405		United States
Fax:    +1 650 872 2417

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> — 2005-10-09T13:16:22Z

On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 05:01:50PM -0500, Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> Though AFAIK there wouldn't be anything illegal about someone with a
> commercial license of MySQL using the GPL'd version of InnoDB... but of
> course if they did that they'd have GPL'd software again, so no reason
> to pay for the commercial license of MySQL.
> 
> This is the first time I can think of where software being GPL'd might
> actually hurt the open-source community.

Well now, that kind of depends on what you define as "hurt". If you
were only ever interested in the GPL version, none of this makes a whit
of difference.

If all you wanted was that your code was shared and that people who
benefitted shared also, then the GPL serves the purpose. Without the
GPL possibly neither InnoDB or MySQL would have been open-source in the
first place. (Maybe, maybe not. I'm not going to argue this point).

OTOH, if your goal is to "share the wealth" and let everyone get good
code for whatever purpose they want, then they would have chosen BSD
licence. This is what PostgreSQL does.

The political goals of the GPL are hardly secret. Some people might
consider this an example of what happens if you rely on proprietary
software models. At least we still have the code *now* (under the GPL).

Have a nice day,
-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout   <kleptog@svana.org>   http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a
> tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone
> else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> — 2005-10-09T16:18:23Z

uwe@oss4u.com ("Uwe C. Schroeder") writes:
> On Saturday 08 October 2005 21:07, Chris Browne wrote:
>>  2.  The code base was pretty old, pretty creaky, and has a *really*
>>      heavy learning curve.
>>
>>      It was pretty famous as being *really* difficult to build; throw
>>      together such things as:
>>       - It uses a custom set of build tools that were created for a
>>         mainframe environment and sorta hacked into Python
>>       - Naming conventions for files, variables, and functions combine
>>         pseudo-German with an affinity for 8 character names that are
>>         anything but mnemonic.  (Think: "Germans developing on MVS.")
>>       - I seem to recall there being a Pascal translator to transform
>>         some of the code into C++...
>
> WOW - careful now. I'm german - but then, there's a reason why I
> immigrated to the US :-)

I'm 1/4 German, and a couple brothers married German girls, so I'm not
trying to be mean, by any stretch.

The bad Procrustean part is the "8 character mainframe" aspect, as it
takes things that might have been mnemonic, at least to those knowing
German, and distills things down in size so as to lose even that.

It truly *was* Germans developing on MVS (or TSO or OS/360 or such)...

>>      Doing substantial revisions to it seems unlikely.  Doing terribly
>>      much more than trying to keep it able to compile on a few
>>      platforms of interest seems unlikely.
>>
>> When they announced at OSCON that MySQL 5.0 would have all of the
>> features essential to support SAP R/3, that fit the best theories
>> available as to why they took on "MaxDB", namely to figure out the
>> minimal set of additions needed to get MySQL to be able to host R/3.
>>
>> If that be the case, then Oracle just took about the minimal action
>> necessary to take the wind out of their sails :-).
>
> SAPdb (aka Adabas D) is something I worked with quite a while ago. And you're 
> right, the naming schemes and restrictions, as well as severe 
> incompatibilities with the SQL standard where one of my major reasons to drop 
> that database in favor of Informix (at that time) and PostgreSQL later on.
> It was kind of tough to generate explanatory table names with those kind of 
> limitations. Nonetheless back then (maybe around 1993) Adabas D was a quite 
> powerful and considerably cheap alternative to anything serious at the market 
> - and it was easy to sell to customers (back in germany) just because this 
> was THE database powering SAP R/3.

And SAP R/3 has its own "8 character mainframe limits," often
involving somewhat Germanic things, abbreviated :-).

> But you may be right - considering what the codebase of SAPdb must
> look like it's probably unlikely MySQL AB can make any considerable
> improvements in the time available.

When Slashdot sorts of people propose "Oh, that can just be another
storage engine!", well, I'll believe it if I see someone implement the
refactoring.

In one of the recent discussions, someone proposed the thought of
MySQL AB adopting the PostgreSQL storage engine as Yet Another One Of
Their Engines.  Hands up, anyone that thinks that's likely tomorrow
:-).

What would seem interesting to me would be the idea of building a
PostgreSQL front end for "Tutorial D" as an alternative to SQL.  I
don't imagine that will be happening tomorrow, either.  :-)
-- 
(reverse (concatenate 'string "gro.gultn" "@" "enworbbc"))
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/oses.html
Rules of the Evil Overlord #200. "During times of peace, my Legions of
Terror will  not be permitted to  lie around drinking  mead and eating
roast boar. Instead they will be  required to obey my dietician and my
aerobics instructor." <http://www.eviloverlord.com/>

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@pervasive.com> — 2005-10-09T16:51:21Z

On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 03:16:22PM +0200, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 05:01:50PM -0500, Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> > Though AFAIK there wouldn't be anything illegal about someone with a
> > commercial license of MySQL using the GPL'd version of InnoDB... but of
> > course if they did that they'd have GPL'd software again, so no reason
> > to pay for the commercial license of MySQL.
> > 
> > This is the first time I can think of where software being GPL'd might
> > actually hurt the open-source community.
> 
> Well now, that kind of depends on what you define as "hurt". If you
> were only ever interested in the GPL version, none of this makes a whit
> of difference.
> 
> If all you wanted was that your code was shared and that people who
> benefitted shared also, then the GPL serves the purpose. Without the
> GPL possibly neither InnoDB or MySQL would have been open-source in the
> first place. (Maybe, maybe not. I'm not going to argue this point).
> 
> OTOH, if your goal is to "share the wealth" and let everyone get good
> code for whatever purpose they want, then they would have chosen BSD
> licence. This is what PostgreSQL does.
> 
> The political goals of the GPL are hardly secret. Some people might
> consider this an example of what happens if you rely on proprietary
> software models. At least we still have the code *now* (under the GPL).

Well, consider that MySQL would probably still be trying to figure out
what a subquery was if it didn't have commercial backing from it's
parent company. Hurting that parent company is going to impact the code.

Of course, this works both ways. It used to be that Linux was definately
behind FreeBSD from a technology standpoint. After companies like IBM
have poured millions into it that's no longer the case. It's certainly
possible that these companies adopted Linux over FreeBSD because it was
GPL'd.

But at least for the database market, the GPL license seems to be a
downside for MySQL. Many commercial users would rather use a non-GPL'd
database, and pay companies for support. Those companies can then give
back to the community. So whereas MySQL only has support from MySQL AB,
PostgreSQL has support from more than a half-dozen companies (some with
very big pockets).

And since most all the code in PostgreSQL is BSD licensed, I don't think
it would be possible for Oracle to 'pull the rug out from under us' as
they appear to have just done with MySQL.

Of course this is nothing but handwaving at this point. It'll be
interesting to see where things are at 6 months from now. Maybe Oracle's
going to use InnoDB as the basis for version 11! ;P
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Rick Morris <rick@brainscraps.com> — 2005-10-10T01:44:16Z

Chris Browne wrote:
> uwe@oss4u.com ("Uwe C. Schroeder") writes:
> 
>>On Saturday 08 October 2005 21:07, Chris Browne wrote:
>>
>>> 2.  The code base was pretty old, pretty creaky, and has a *really*
>>>     heavy learning curve.
>>>
>>>     It was pretty famous as being *really* difficult to build; throw
>>>     together such things as:
>>>      - It uses a custom set of build tools that were created for a
>>>        mainframe environment and sorta hacked into Python
>>>      - Naming conventions for files, variables, and functions combine
>>>        pseudo-German with an affinity for 8 character names that are
>>>        anything but mnemonic.  (Think: "Germans developing on MVS.")
>>>      - I seem to recall there being a Pascal translator to transform
>>>        some of the code into C++...
>>
>>WOW - careful now. I'm german - but then, there's a reason why I
>>immigrated to the US :-)
> 
> 
> I'm 1/4 German, and a couple brothers married German girls, so I'm not
> trying to be mean, by any stretch.
> 
> The bad Procrustean part is the "8 character mainframe" aspect, as it
> takes things that might have been mnemonic, at least to those knowing
> German, and distills things down in size so as to lose even that.
> 
> It truly *was* Germans developing on MVS (or TSO or OS/360 or such)...
> 
> 
>>>     Doing substantial revisions to it seems unlikely.  Doing terribly
>>>     much more than trying to keep it able to compile on a few
>>>     platforms of interest seems unlikely.
>>>
>>>When they announced at OSCON that MySQL 5.0 would have all of the
>>>features essential to support SAP R/3, that fit the best theories
>>>available as to why they took on "MaxDB", namely to figure out the
>>>minimal set of additions needed to get MySQL to be able to host R/3.
>>>
>>>If that be the case, then Oracle just took about the minimal action
>>>necessary to take the wind out of their sails :-).
>>
>>SAPdb (aka Adabas D) is something I worked with quite a while ago. And you're 
>>right, the naming schemes and restrictions, as well as severe 
>>incompatibilities with the SQL standard where one of my major reasons to drop 
>>that database in favor of Informix (at that time) and PostgreSQL later on.
>>It was kind of tough to generate explanatory table names with those kind of 
>>limitations. Nonetheless back then (maybe around 1993) Adabas D was a quite 
>>powerful and considerably cheap alternative to anything serious at the market 
>>- and it was easy to sell to customers (back in germany) just because this 
>>was THE database powering SAP R/3.
> 
> 
> And SAP R/3 has its own "8 character mainframe limits," often
> involving somewhat Germanic things, abbreviated :-).
> 
> 
>>But you may be right - considering what the codebase of SAPdb must
>>look like it's probably unlikely MySQL AB can make any considerable
>>improvements in the time available.
> 
> 
> When Slashdot sorts of people propose "Oh, that can just be another
> storage engine!", well, I'll believe it if I see someone implement the
> refactoring.
> 
> In one of the recent discussions, someone proposed the thought of
> MySQL AB adopting the PostgreSQL storage engine as Yet Another One Of
> Their Engines.  Hands up, anyone that thinks that's likely tomorrow
> :-).
> 
> What would seem interesting to me would be the idea of building a
> PostgreSQL front end for "Tutorial D" as an alternative to SQL.  I
> don't imagine that will be happening tomorrow, either.  :-)

But much more interesting to consider, indeed.

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

richard_d_levine@raytheon.com — 2005-10-10T15:59:02Z


pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org wrote on 10/09/2005 08:16:22 AM:

> >
> > This is the first time I can think of where software being GPL'd might
> > actually hurt the open-source community.

The MySQL license has been modified so that it is, IMHO, not compatible
with the GPL.  The basic tenet of the GPL is that I can freely copy and
distribute, I just have to give back my contributions.  MySQL cannot be
freely copied and distributed if you are going to make money.

MySQL built a business model based on this modification, not on GPL.  Had
they left the GPL alone and used a consulting business model, they would
not be in this mess.  The business model, the GPLing of the drivers, and
the FUD show a commercial operation parading as a FOSS advocate.

I find the discussion of FOSS RDBMS developers uniting against Oracle
strange.  What are you going to hit them with? Your massive marketing
budgets?  The only weapon available is the quality of the products, and
PostgreSQL is already wielding that weapon mightily.

What is Oracle after?  Small DB technology?  They already have rdb.
Firebird, back in the Groton Database Corporation days, was built to be
compatible with rdb.  Marrying those technologies through modification of
existing gateways makes more technological sense than InnoDB.

Oracle is trying for market share, as they always do, but it appears ill
conceived.  MySQL is for people who can't or won't tune and manage a DBMS.
Oracle products are just not going to fit.  Both on price and complexity.
If they kill MySQL, they are just going to increase other true FOSS RDBMS
projects' market share.  Power to them.

Cheers,

Rick

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> — 2005-10-11T04:49:05Z

Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com wrote:
> What is Oracle after?  Small DB technology?  They already have rdb.
> Firebird, back in the Groton Database Corporation days, was built to be
> compatible with rdb.  Marrying those technologies through modification of
> existing gateways makes more technological sense than InnoDB.
> 
> Oracle is trying for market share, as they always do, but it appears ill
> conceived.  MySQL is for people who can't or won't tune and manage a DBMS.
> Oracle products are just not going to fit.  Both on price and complexity.
> If they kill MySQL, they are just going to increase other true FOSS RDBMS
> projects' market share.  Power to them.

Oracle must know that the comodity database days are coming.  By
attacking MySQL they delay that time by another few quarters, perhaps.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> — 2005-10-11T04:53:26Z

Chris Browne wrote:
> uwe@oss4u.com ("Uwe C. Schroeder") writes:
> > On Saturday 08 October 2005 21:07, Chris Browne wrote:
> >>  2.  The code base was pretty old, pretty creaky, and has a *really*
> >>      heavy learning curve.
> >>
> >>      It was pretty famous as being *really* difficult to build; throw
> >>      together such things as:
> >>       - It uses a custom set of build tools that were created for a
> >>         mainframe environment and sorta hacked into Python
> >>       - Naming conventions for files, variables, and functions combine
> >>         pseudo-German with an affinity for 8 character names that are
> >>         anything but mnemonic.  (Think: "Germans developing on MVS.")
> >>       - I seem to recall there being a Pascal translator to transform
> >>         some of the code into C++...
> >
> > WOW - careful now. I'm german - but then, there's a reason why I
> > immigrated to the US :-)
> 
> I'm 1/4 German, and a couple brothers married German girls, so I'm not
> trying to be mean, by any stretch.
> 
> The bad Procrustean part is the "8 character mainframe" aspect, as it
> takes things that might have been mnemonic, at least to those knowing
> German, and distills things down in size so as to lose even that.
> 
> It truly *was* Germans developing on MVS (or TSO or OS/360 or such)...

Just to clarify, directory names are single letters, and file names are
numbers --- I kid you not.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Robert Treat <xzilla@users.sourceforge.net> — 2005-10-11T13:48:57Z

On Tuesday 11 October 2005 00:49, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com wrote:
> > What is Oracle after?  Small DB technology?  They already have rdb.
> > Firebird, back in the Groton Database Corporation days, was built to be
> > compatible with rdb.  Marrying those technologies through modification of
> > existing gateways makes more technological sense than InnoDB.
> >
> > Oracle is trying for market share, as they always do, but it appears ill
> > conceived.  MySQL is for people who can't or won't tune and manage a
> > DBMS. Oracle products are just not going to fit.  Both on price and
> > complexity. If they kill MySQL, they are just going to increase other
> > true FOSS RDBMS projects' market share.  Power to them.
>
> Oracle must know that the comodity database days are coming.  By
> attacking MySQL they delay that time by another few quarters, perhaps.

I've been thinking more and more that oracle just want's leverage against 
my$ql to force them to live up to thier claims that they "don't compete with 
oracle".  Ie. there are a few large commercial applications (think erp and 
crm) that my$ql has been targeting to be able to support with 5.0 that would 
compete directly with oracle (by way of giving those application vendors 
leverage to use my$ql instead of oracle).  Part of a future licensing 
agreement might be that my$ql stay out of those markets.  

-- 
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> — 2005-10-11T22:04:40Z

We have entered a new phase in the possible attacks on PostgreSQL.

The purchase of InnoDB clearly shows Oracle is ready to expend money to
slow down competitive database technology.  Now that MySQL has been
attacked, we should expect to be the next target.

Let's assume Oracle is willing to spend 1% of their revenue or net
income on attacking PostgreSQL.  Given this financial statement:

	http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ORCL&annual

that would be USD $20-100 million.  (The Oracle financial statement will
eventually disclose the purchase price of InnoDB, and we can use that as
a minimum amount they would be willing to spend.)

Now, I think Oracle realizes that the database will eventually become a
commodity based on their purchase of Peoplesoft and other application
technology.  However, every financial period they delay that time is
more profit for them, so it is a cost/benefit of how much it is worth to
slow down PostgreSQL.  Obviously they thought the InnoDB purchase was
worth it to slow down or control MySQL.  Our goal should be to make the
cost of attacks higher than the benefit.

Here are the three most likely attacks on our project:

o  Hiring 

Oracle could hire a large portion of our paid or volunteer developers,
thereby slowing down the project.  Individuals would probably be
approach as "We like your work on PostgreSQL and would like your
expertise in improving Oracle", but of course once hired what they did
for Oracle would be unimportant.  What would be important is what they
_don't_ do for PostgreSQL.

o  Trademark

Marc Fournier owns the PostgreSQL trademark and domain names.  He could
be attacked, perhaps by hiring him to do a job, causing it to fail, then
suing him to obtain the trademark, and therefore the right to own the
domain names.  The trademark has not been enforced, and it would be hard
to enforce at this stage, but I think it would be effective in gaining
control of the domain names.

o  Patents

Most technology people agree the software patent system is broken, but
it could be a potent weapon against us, though we have shown we can
efficiently remove patent issue from our code.


There is probably nothing Oracle can do to permanently harm us, but
there are a variety of things they can do to temporarily slow us down,
and it is likely a attempt will be made in the future.  There are also
possible threats to PostgreSQL support companies, though they are
somewhat independent of the project.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@pervasive.com> — 2005-10-11T22:28:04Z

Of course one flip-side to all this is that if Oracle does attack us it
actually lends credibility; it means they see PostgreSQL as a threat. At
this point that could do more good for us than harm, depending on how
exactly the attacked.

On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 06:04:40PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> We have entered a new phase in the possible attacks on PostgreSQL.
> 
> The purchase of InnoDB clearly shows Oracle is ready to expend money to
> slow down competitive database technology.  Now that MySQL has been
> attacked, we should expect to be the next target.
> 
> Let's assume Oracle is willing to spend 1% of their revenue or net
> income on attacking PostgreSQL.  Given this financial statement:
> 
> 	http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ORCL&annual
> 
> that would be USD $20-100 million.  (The Oracle financial statement will
> eventually disclose the purchase price of InnoDB, and we can use that as
> a minimum amount they would be willing to spend.)
> 
> Now, I think Oracle realizes that the database will eventually become a
> commodity based on their purchase of Peoplesoft and other application
> technology.  However, every financial period they delay that time is
> more profit for them, so it is a cost/benefit of how much it is worth to
> slow down PostgreSQL.  Obviously they thought the InnoDB purchase was
> worth it to slow down or control MySQL.  Our goal should be to make the
> cost of attacks higher than the benefit.
> 
> Here are the three most likely attacks on our project:
> 
> o  Hiring 
> 
> Oracle could hire a large portion of our paid or volunteer developers,
> thereby slowing down the project.  Individuals would probably be
> approach as "We like your work on PostgreSQL and would like your
> expertise in improving Oracle", but of course once hired what they did
> for Oracle would be unimportant.  What would be important is what they
> _don't_ do for PostgreSQL.
> 
> o  Trademark
> 
> Marc Fournier owns the PostgreSQL trademark and domain names.  He could
> be attacked, perhaps by hiring him to do a job, causing it to fail, then
> suing him to obtain the trademark, and therefore the right to own the
> domain names.  The trademark has not been enforced, and it would be hard
> to enforce at this stage, but I think it would be effective in gaining
> control of the domain names.
> 
> o  Patents
> 
> Most technology people agree the software patent system is broken, but
> it could be a potent weapon against us, though we have shown we can
> efficiently remove patent issue from our code.
> 
> 
> There is probably nothing Oracle can do to permanently harm us, but
> there are a variety of things they can do to temporarily slow us down,
> and it is likely a attempt will be made in the future.  There are also
> possible threats to PostgreSQL support companies, though they are
> somewhat independent of the project.
> 
> -- 
>   Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
>   pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
>   +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
>   +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073
> 
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate
>        subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@postgresql.org so that your
>        message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
> 

-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> — 2005-10-11T22:31:06Z

Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> Of course one flip-side to all this is that if Oracle does attack us it
> actually lends credibility; it means they see PostgreSQL as a threat. At
> this point that could do more good for us than harm, depending on how
> exactly the attacked.

Well, that was MySQL's reaction to it, but I think the harm far
outweighs the good for them.  Its more like, "Oracle finds MySQL a
threat, what is MySQL going to do now!"  We don't want that kind of
outcome.  Also, there are ways of attacking that do not show Oracle as
an agreesor, like hiring PostgreSQL developers.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------


> 
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 06:04:40PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > We have entered a new phase in the possible attacks on PostgreSQL.
> > 
> > The purchase of InnoDB clearly shows Oracle is ready to expend money to
> > slow down competitive database technology.  Now that MySQL has been
> > attacked, we should expect to be the next target.
> > 
> > Let's assume Oracle is willing to spend 1% of their revenue or net
> > income on attacking PostgreSQL.  Given this financial statement:
> > 
> > 	http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ORCL&annual
> > 
> > that would be USD $20-100 million.  (The Oracle financial statement will
> > eventually disclose the purchase price of InnoDB, and we can use that as
> > a minimum amount they would be willing to spend.)
> > 
> > Now, I think Oracle realizes that the database will eventually become a
> > commodity based on their purchase of Peoplesoft and other application
> > technology.  However, every financial period they delay that time is
> > more profit for them, so it is a cost/benefit of how much it is worth to
> > slow down PostgreSQL.  Obviously they thought the InnoDB purchase was
> > worth it to slow down or control MySQL.  Our goal should be to make the
> > cost of attacks higher than the benefit.
> > 
> > Here are the three most likely attacks on our project:
> > 
> > o  Hiring 
> > 
> > Oracle could hire a large portion of our paid or volunteer developers,
> > thereby slowing down the project.  Individuals would probably be
> > approach as "We like your work on PostgreSQL and would like your
> > expertise in improving Oracle", but of course once hired what they did
> > for Oracle would be unimportant.  What would be important is what they
> > _don't_ do for PostgreSQL.
> > 
> > o  Trademark
> > 
> > Marc Fournier owns the PostgreSQL trademark and domain names.  He could
> > be attacked, perhaps by hiring him to do a job, causing it to fail, then
> > suing him to obtain the trademark, and therefore the right to own the
> > domain names.  The trademark has not been enforced, and it would be hard
> > to enforce at this stage, but I think it would be effective in gaining
> > control of the domain names.
> > 
> > o  Patents
> > 
> > Most technology people agree the software patent system is broken, but
> > it could be a potent weapon against us, though we have shown we can
> > efficiently remove patent issue from our code.
> > 
> > 
> > There is probably nothing Oracle can do to permanently harm us, but
> > there are a variety of things they can do to temporarily slow us down,
> > and it is likely a attempt will be made in the future.  There are also
> > possible threats to PostgreSQL support companies, though they are
> > somewhat independent of the project.
> > 
> > -- 
> >   Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
> >   pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
> >   +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
> >   +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073
> > 
> > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> > TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate
> >        subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@postgresql.org so that your
> >        message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
> > 
> 
> -- 
> Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
> Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
> vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461
> 

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> — 2005-10-11T22:52:16Z

Here is a followup to this email.  A few people asked me questions off
list, and here are my replies:

[ Comment mentioning Open Office and Mozilla have not been attacked.]

Cconsider that one thing that has restrained Microsoft (and previously
IBM) was US Department of Justice oversight.  Oracle does not have such
oversight, so they are more likely to act aggressively. Basically, just
because attacks have not happened in the Linux or Open Office areas
(Microsoft territory) does not mean they will not happen in the database
area.  Oracle has a history of aggressive activity, and it has shown
with MySQL now.  I doubt many would have thought Oracle would have
purchased technology that MySQL depends upon before it happened.

Oracle certainly will not win, and I think they know that, but as
project leaders, we should try to be defensive to prevent attacks from
inflicting harm to the project.

[ Comment asking what we can do to protect ourselves.]

We can't do much, actually.  The trademark thing can be secured, but
other than that, I see no other defenses we could use.  We can't prevent
people from being hired, and we can't guard against patent attacks.

I am willing to write up something for our web site if people think that
would be helpful.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> We have entered a new phase in the possible attacks on PostgreSQL.
> 
> The purchase of InnoDB clearly shows Oracle is ready to expend money to
> slow down competitive database technology.  Now that MySQL has been
> attacked, we should expect to be the next target.
> 
> Let's assume Oracle is willing to spend 1% of their revenue or net
> income on attacking PostgreSQL.  Given this financial statement:
> 
> 	http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ORCL&annual
> 
> that would be USD $20-100 million.  (The Oracle financial statement will
> eventually disclose the purchase price of InnoDB, and we can use that as
> a minimum amount they would be willing to spend.)
> 
> Now, I think Oracle realizes that the database will eventually become a
> commodity based on their purchase of Peoplesoft and other application
> technology.  However, every financial period they delay that time is
> more profit for them, so it is a cost/benefit of how much it is worth to
> slow down PostgreSQL.  Obviously they thought the InnoDB purchase was
> worth it to slow down or control MySQL.  Our goal should be to make the
> cost of attacks higher than the benefit.
> 
> Here are the three most likely attacks on our project:
> 
> o  Hiring 
> 
> Oracle could hire a large portion of our paid or volunteer developers,
> thereby slowing down the project.  Individuals would probably be
> approach as "We like your work on PostgreSQL and would like your
> expertise in improving Oracle", but of course once hired what they did
> for Oracle would be unimportant.  What would be important is what they
> _don't_ do for PostgreSQL.
> 
> o  Trademark
> 
> Marc Fournier owns the PostgreSQL trademark and domain names.  He could
> be attacked, perhaps by hiring him to do a job, causing it to fail, then
> suing him to obtain the trademark, and therefore the right to own the
> domain names.  The trademark has not been enforced, and it would be hard
> to enforce at this stage, but I think it would be effective in gaining
> control of the domain names.
> 
> o  Patents
> 
> Most technology people agree the software patent system is broken, but
> it could be a potent weapon against us, though we have shown we can
> efficiently remove patent issue from our code.
> 
> 
> There is probably nothing Oracle can do to permanently harm us, but
> there are a variety of things they can do to temporarily slow us down,
> and it is likely a attempt will be made in the future.  There are also
> possible threats to PostgreSQL support companies, though they are
> somewhat independent of the project.
> 
> -- 
>   Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
>   pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
>   +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
>   +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073
> 
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate
>        subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@postgresql.org so that your
>        message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
> 

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@pervasive.com> — 2005-10-11T22:54:41Z

On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 06:31:06PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> > Of course one flip-side to all this is that if Oracle does attack us it
> > actually lends credibility; it means they see PostgreSQL as a threat. At
> > this point that could do more good for us than harm, depending on how
> > exactly the attacked.
> 
> Well, that was MySQL's reaction to it, but I think the harm far
> outweighs the good for them.  Its more like, "Oracle finds MySQL a
> threat, what is MySQL going to do now!"  We don't want that kind of
> outcome.  Also, there are ways of attacking that do not show Oracle as
> an agreesor, like hiring PostgreSQL developers.

Well, they effectively took a big chunk of MySQL's commercial technology
away, something the'd have a harder time doing with PostgreSQL (unless
we're violating patents).
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@pervasive.com> — 2005-10-11T23:02:25Z

On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 06:52:16PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> We can't do much, actually.  The trademark thing can be secured, but
> other than that, I see no other defenses we could use.  We can't prevent
> people from being hired, and we can't guard against patent attacks.

Actually, I think there's things that can be done in both cases. For
patents, we need to ensure that we're not using technology that's
covered by patents. But even so, this is really more of an issue for
commercial entities using PostgreSQL. There's not very much Oracle could
go after in the community.

As for developers, the way that can be defended against is by keeping
the developers in demand at companies that are commercializing
PostgreSQL. The way that's done is by supporting those companies so that
they're PostgreSQL operations are profitable and they have the desire to
keep their talent around. Granted, Oracle has more money laying around
than probably all current commercial ventures combined, but I would
venture to guess that most people in the community would be very
hesitant to even consider a job at Oracle.

As an ironic aside, I actually turned down a job at Oracle about 18
months ago. Before anyone worries though, it was offered by a friend and
PostgreSQL wasn't an issue at all.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Philip Hallstrom <postgresql@philip.pjkh.com> — 2005-10-11T23:51:49Z

> [ Comment asking what we can do to protect ourselves.]
>
> We can't do much, actually.  The trademark thing can be secured, but
> other than that, I see no other defenses we could use.  We can't prevent
> people from being hired, and we can't guard against patent attacks.

Seems you could argue that if the success of the postgresql project is in 
the hands of so few then we've got issues regardless of Oracle.  Those 
people could (heaven forbid) get hit by the proverbial bus.  It would have 
the same effect on postgresql itself.  Anyway, just something to keep in 
mind...

> I am willing to write up something for our web site if people think that
> would be helpful.

I think it it might be worth mentioning (in response to the 
mysql/innodb/oracle issue) that there's nothing for Oracle to purchase 
that would limit postgresql in the future -- that postgresql doesn't rely 
on any commercially licensed code the removal of which would adversely 
affect postgresql itself.

Anyway, that's my little 2 cents... :)

-philip

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Jan Wieck <janwieck@yahoo.com> — 2005-10-12T00:02:48Z

On 10/11/2005 6:31 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Jim C. Nasby wrote:
>> Of course one flip-side to all this is that if Oracle does attack us it
>> actually lends credibility; it means they see PostgreSQL as a threat. At
>> this point that could do more good for us than harm, depending on how
>> exactly the attacked.
> 
> Well, that was MySQL's reaction to it, but I think the harm far
> outweighs the good for them.  Its more like, "Oracle finds MySQL a
> threat, what is MySQL going to do now!"  We don't want that kind of
> outcome.  Also, there are ways of attacking that do not show Oracle as
> an agreesor, like hiring PostgreSQL developers.

 From the fact that there was first an Oracle announcement and then some 
"calming words" from MySQL we can tell that this wasn't friendly. If it 
would have been, they would have had a joint press release instead of 
this big grin from Oracle and that clenched teeth smile from MySQL in 
return. So I agree, they are in deep trouble.

Now the much I agree that we should be carefull and watch out, I don't 
think we should be jumping to conclusions either. Nobody outside Oracle 
knows right now what their real plan and their real target with that 
acquisition is.

Don't forget that only a part, although a substantial part, of Oracles 
revenue comes out of the database business. One possibility is that they 
try to do birth control against a low-cost R/3 backend, which 
undoubtedly would be very bad for their CRM and ERP business in several 
ways. After failing to build any open source community, SAP had found 
MySQL, who was willing to maintain the SAP-DB sourcecode for them. If 
Oracle squishes MySQL now, SAP is back to square one on that project. 
There are many R/3 installations out there that go well beyond 1/4 
million dollars per year in DB license fees alone. So even if they can 
only delay this development by two to three years, it might pay off 
quite well.

And look at it, all Oracle would have to do is to be so open source 
friendly that they make InnoDB GPL only. Can you imagine the confusion 
in the MySQL fan club if Oracle releases the next GPL version of InnoDB 
and MySQL AB announces that they ripped out InnoDB support and favor 
something with half the feature set instead?


Jan

> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
>> 
>> On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 06:04:40PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> > We have entered a new phase in the possible attacks on PostgreSQL.
>> > 
>> > The purchase of InnoDB clearly shows Oracle is ready to expend money to
>> > slow down competitive database technology.  Now that MySQL has been
>> > attacked, we should expect to be the next target.
>> > 
>> > Let's assume Oracle is willing to spend 1% of their revenue or net
>> > income on attacking PostgreSQL.  Given this financial statement:
>> > 
>> > 	http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ORCL&annual
>> > 
>> > that would be USD $20-100 million.  (The Oracle financial statement will
>> > eventually disclose the purchase price of InnoDB, and we can use that as
>> > a minimum amount they would be willing to spend.)
>> > 
>> > Now, I think Oracle realizes that the database will eventually become a
>> > commodity based on their purchase of Peoplesoft and other application
>> > technology.  However, every financial period they delay that time is
>> > more profit for them, so it is a cost/benefit of how much it is worth to
>> > slow down PostgreSQL.  Obviously they thought the InnoDB purchase was
>> > worth it to slow down or control MySQL.  Our goal should be to make the
>> > cost of attacks higher than the benefit.
>> > 
>> > Here are the three most likely attacks on our project:
>> > 
>> > o  Hiring 
>> > 
>> > Oracle could hire a large portion of our paid or volunteer developers,
>> > thereby slowing down the project.  Individuals would probably be
>> > approach as "We like your work on PostgreSQL and would like your
>> > expertise in improving Oracle", but of course once hired what they did
>> > for Oracle would be unimportant.  What would be important is what they
>> > _don't_ do for PostgreSQL.
>> > 
>> > o  Trademark
>> > 
>> > Marc Fournier owns the PostgreSQL trademark and domain names.  He could
>> > be attacked, perhaps by hiring him to do a job, causing it to fail, then
>> > suing him to obtain the trademark, and therefore the right to own the
>> > domain names.  The trademark has not been enforced, and it would be hard
>> > to enforce at this stage, but I think it would be effective in gaining
>> > control of the domain names.
>> > 
>> > o  Patents
>> > 
>> > Most technology people agree the software patent system is broken, but
>> > it could be a potent weapon against us, though we have shown we can
>> > efficiently remove patent issue from our code.
>> > 
>> > 
>> > There is probably nothing Oracle can do to permanently harm us, but
>> > there are a variety of things they can do to temporarily slow us down,
>> > and it is likely a attempt will be made in the future.  There are also
>> > possible threats to PostgreSQL support companies, though they are
>> > somewhat independent of the project.
>> > 
>> > -- 
>> >   Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
>> >   pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
>> >   +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
>> >   +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073
>> > 
>> > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
>> > TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate
>> >        subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@postgresql.org so that your
>> >        message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
>> > 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
>> Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
>> vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461
>> 
> 


-- 
#======================================================================#
# It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than for being right. #
# Let's break this rule - forgive me.                                  #
#================================================== JanWieck@Yahoo.com #

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Javier Soltero <javier.soltero@hyperic.net> — 2005-10-12T00:26:39Z

I agree with Jan.

I think a good part of this whole situation has more to do with MySQL  
having a core part of its product be dependent on an external entity.  
Be they open source or not. I would think they have thought about  
this possibility at various points in the past.

 From where I sit, I dont see PostgreSQL having the same situation,  
but perhaps there's some other ridiculously popular extension to pg  
which I dont know about. I'd vote for just continuing to make a  
better product, compete aggressively on the pr front (where pg still  
has some way to go), and let the best player win.
___________________________________
Javier Soltero
Hyperic                  |  www.hyperic.net
o- 415 738 2566  |  c- 415 305 8733
javier.soltero@hyperic.net
___________________________________

On Oct 11, 2005, at 5:02 PM, Jan Wieck wrote:

> On 10/11/2005 6:31 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
>
>> Jim C. Nasby wrote:
>>
>>> Of course one flip-side to all this is that if Oracle does attack  
>>> us it
>>> actually lends credibility; it means they see PostgreSQL as a  
>>> threat. At
>>> this point that could do more good for us than harm, depending on  
>>> how
>>> exactly the attacked.
>>>
>> Well, that was MySQL's reaction to it, but I think the harm far
>> outweighs the good for them.  Its more like, "Oracle finds MySQL a
>> threat, what is MySQL going to do now!"  We don't want that kind of
>> outcome.  Also, there are ways of attacking that do not show  
>> Oracle as
>> an agreesor, like hiring PostgreSQL developers.
>>
>
> From the fact that there was first an Oracle announcement and then  
> some "calming words" from MySQL we can tell that this wasn't  
> friendly. If it would have been, they would have had a joint press  
> release instead of this big grin from Oracle and that clenched  
> teeth smile from MySQL in return. So I agree, they are in deep  
> trouble.
>
> Now the much I agree that we should be carefull and watch out, I  
> don't think we should be jumping to conclusions either. Nobody  
> outside Oracle knows right now what their real plan and their real  
> target with that acquisition is.
>
> Don't forget that only a part, although a substantial part, of  
> Oracles revenue comes out of the database business. One possibility  
> is that they try to do birth control against a low-cost R/3  
> backend, which undoubtedly would be very bad for their CRM and ERP  
> business in several ways. After failing to build any open source  
> community, SAP had found MySQL, who was willing to maintain the SAP- 
> DB sourcecode for them. If Oracle squishes MySQL now, SAP is back  
> to square one on that project. There are many R/3 installations out  
> there that go well beyond 1/4 million dollars per year in DB  
> license fees alone. So even if they can only delay this development  
> by two to three years, it might pay off quite well.
>
> And look at it, all Oracle would have to do is to be so open source  
> friendly that they make InnoDB GPL only. Can you imagine the  
> confusion in the MySQL fan club if Oracle releases the next GPL  
> version of InnoDB and MySQL AB announces that they ripped out  
> InnoDB support and favor something with half the feature set instead?
>
>
> Jan
>
>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>> ------
>>
>>> On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 06:04:40PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>>> > We have entered a new phase in the possible attacks on PostgreSQL.
>>> > > The purchase of InnoDB clearly shows Oracle is ready to  
>>> expend money to
>>> > slow down competitive database technology.  Now that MySQL has  
>>> been
>>> > attacked, we should expect to be the next target.
>>> > > Let's assume Oracle is willing to spend 1% of their revenue  
>>> or net
>>> > income on attacking PostgreSQL.  Given this financial statement:
>>> > >     http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ORCL&annual
>>> > > that would be USD $20-100 million.  (The Oracle financial  
>>> statement will
>>> > eventually disclose the purchase price of InnoDB, and we can  
>>> use that as
>>> > a minimum amount they would be willing to spend.)
>>> > > Now, I think Oracle realizes that the database will  
>>> eventually become a
>>> > commodity based on their purchase of Peoplesoft and other  
>>> application
>>> > technology.  However, every financial period they delay that  
>>> time is
>>> > more profit for them, so it is a cost/benefit of how much it is  
>>> worth to
>>> > slow down PostgreSQL.  Obviously they thought the InnoDB  
>>> purchase was
>>> > worth it to slow down or control MySQL.  Our goal should be to  
>>> make the
>>> > cost of attacks higher than the benefit.
>>> > > Here are the three most likely attacks on our project:
>>> > > o  Hiring > > Oracle could hire a large portion of our paid  
>>> or volunteer developers,
>>> > thereby slowing down the project.  Individuals would probably be
>>> > approach as "We like your work on PostgreSQL and would like your
>>> > expertise in improving Oracle", but of course once hired what  
>>> they did
>>> > for Oracle would be unimportant.  What would be important is  
>>> what they
>>> > _don't_ do for PostgreSQL.
>>> > > o  Trademark
>>> > > Marc Fournier owns the PostgreSQL trademark and domain  
>>> names.  He could
>>> > be attacked, perhaps by hiring him to do a job, causing it to  
>>> fail, then
>>> > suing him to obtain the trademark, and therefore the right to  
>>> own the
>>> > domain names.  The trademark has not been enforced, and it  
>>> would be hard
>>> > to enforce at this stage, but I think it would be effective in  
>>> gaining
>>> > control of the domain names.
>>> > > o  Patents
>>> > > Most technology people agree the software patent system is  
>>> broken, but
>>> > it could be a potent weapon against us, though we have shown we  
>>> can
>>> > efficiently remove patent issue from our code.
>>> > > > There is probably nothing Oracle can do to permanently harm  
>>> us, but
>>> > there are a variety of things they can do to temporarily slow  
>>> us down,
>>> > and it is likely a attempt will be made in the future.  There  
>>> are also
>>> > possible threats to PostgreSQL support companies, though they are
>>> > somewhat independent of the project.
>>> > > -- >   Bruce Momjian                        |  http:// 
>>> candle.pha.pa.us
>>> >   pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
>>> >   +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
>>> >   +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square,  
>>> Pennsylvania 19073
>>> > > ---------------------------(end of  
>>> broadcast)---------------------------
>>> > TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an  
>>> appropriate
>>> >        subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@postgresql.org so  
>>> that your
>>> >        message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
>>> > --
>>> Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
>>> Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
>>> vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461
>>>
>
>
> -- 
> #===================================================================== 
> =#
> # It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than for being  
> right. #
> # Let's break this rule - forgive  
> me.                                  #
> #==================================================  
> JanWieck@Yahoo.com #
>
> ---------------------------(end of  
> broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives?
>
>               http://archives.postgresql.org
>

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2005-10-12T02:59:16Z

Jan Wieck <JanWieck@Yahoo.com> writes:
> And look at it, all Oracle would have to do is to be so open source 
> friendly that they make InnoDB GPL only. Can you imagine the confusion 
> in the MySQL fan club if Oracle releases the next GPL version of InnoDB 
> and MySQL AB announces that they ripped out InnoDB support and favor 
> something with half the feature set instead?

ROTFL ... yes, you would have to give Oracle ten points out of ten for
style, if they did it that way.

			regards, tom lane

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> — 2005-10-12T07:36:12Z

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 18:52 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Oracle certainly will not win, and I think they know that

I think this too and that's why I'm here. 

Best Regards, Simon Riggs

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Ned Lilly <ned@nedscape.com> — 2005-10-12T14:34:58Z

Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Marc Fournier owns the PostgreSQL trademark and domain names.  

Minor point here, but the following domain names:

postgresql.com
postgres.com
postgres.org

... were contributed back to the project by the late Great Bridge LLC, and are registered to the PGDG - with Tom as the admin contact, Marc as the tech contact.  Marc/Hub.org has historically owned postgresql.org and postgresql.net, and it looks like postgres.net got picked up by some guy who's sitting on it.

Cheers,
Ned

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

richard_d_levine@raytheon.com — 2005-10-12T17:30:08Z

pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org wrote on 10/11/2005 09:59:16 PM:

> Jan Wieck <JanWieck@Yahoo.com> writes:
> > And look at it, all Oracle would have to do is to be so open source
> > friendly that they make InnoDB GPL only. Can you imagine the confusion
> > in the MySQL fan club if Oracle releases the next GPL version of InnoDB

> > and MySQL AB announces that they ripped out InnoDB support and favor
> > something with half the feature set instead?
>
> ROTFL ... yes, you would have to give Oracle ten points out of ten for
> style, if they did it that way.

LOL, a round for the judges.  Seriously, all they need to do is drop their
caveat to GPL and sell subscriptions instead of licenses.  They control all
of the source, not taking copyrighted stuff from outside authors.  Look but
do not touch open source.  You want something?  Buy a subscription.  They
are convincing people to buy licenses, not much of a stretch to go to
subscriptions.  That is a winning scenario for everyone, except maybe
Oracle.

Cheers,

Rick
>
>          regards, tom lane
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives?
>
>                http://archives.postgresql.org

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> — 2005-10-12T18:12:02Z

Ned,

> and it looks like postgres.net got picked up by some
> guy who's sitting on it.

yeah, I'm not sure what he wants.  Postgres.net currently directs people to 
PostgreSQL.org, and I've offered the contact of record money to buy it off 
him, with no response.

-- 
--Josh

Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Jussi Mikkola <jussi.mikkola@bonware.com> — 2005-10-12T18:19:19Z

Hi,

Well, if the PostgreSQL developers would be hired away from the project 
with big money, would that not mean, that the project would be a good 
path to earn a lot of money. So, new talented developers could join the 
project and see that as a path to high salary jobs??

Rgs,

Jussi


Bruce Momjian wrote:

>Here is a followup to this email.  A few people asked me questions off
>list, and here are my replies:
>
>[ Comment mentioning Open Office and Mozilla have not been attacked.]
>
>Cconsider that one thing that has restrained Microsoft (and previously
>IBM) was US Department of Justice oversight.  Oracle does not have such
>oversight, so they are more likely to act aggressively. Basically, just
>because attacks have not happened in the Linux or Open Office areas
>(Microsoft territory) does not mean they will not happen in the database
>area.  Oracle has a history of aggressive activity, and it has shown
>with MySQL now.  I doubt many would have thought Oracle would have
>purchased technology that MySQL depends upon before it happened.
>
>Oracle certainly will not win, and I think they know that, but as
>project leaders, we should try to be defensive to prevent attacks from
>inflicting harm to the project.
>
>[ Comment asking what we can do to protect ourselves.]
>
>We can't do much, actually.  The trademark thing can be secured, but
>other than that, I see no other defenses we could use.  We can't prevent
>people from being hired, and we can't guard against patent attacks.
>
>I am willing to write up something for our web site if people think that
>would be helpful.
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Bruce Momjian wrote:
>  
>
>>We have entered a new phase in the possible attacks on PostgreSQL.
>>
>>The purchase of InnoDB clearly shows Oracle is ready to expend money to
>>slow down competitive database technology.  Now that MySQL has been
>>attacked, we should expect to be the next target.
>>
>>Let's assume Oracle is willing to spend 1% of their revenue or net
>>income on attacking PostgreSQL.  Given this financial statement:
>>
>>	http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ORCL&annual
>>
>>that would be USD $20-100 million.  (The Oracle financial statement will
>>eventually disclose the purchase price of InnoDB, and we can use that as
>>a minimum amount they would be willing to spend.)
>>
>>Now, I think Oracle realizes that the database will eventually become a
>>commodity based on their purchase of Peoplesoft and other application
>>technology.  However, every financial period they delay that time is
>>more profit for them, so it is a cost/benefit of how much it is worth to
>>slow down PostgreSQL.  Obviously they thought the InnoDB purchase was
>>worth it to slow down or control MySQL.  Our goal should be to make the
>>cost of attacks higher than the benefit.
>>
>>Here are the three most likely attacks on our project:
>>
>>o  Hiring 
>>
>>Oracle could hire a large portion of our paid or volunteer developers,
>>thereby slowing down the project.  Individuals would probably be
>>approach as "We like your work on PostgreSQL and would like your
>>expertise in improving Oracle", but of course once hired what they did
>>for Oracle would be unimportant.  What would be important is what they
>>_don't_ do for PostgreSQL.
>>
>>o  Trademark
>>
>>Marc Fournier owns the PostgreSQL trademark and domain names.  He could
>>be attacked, perhaps by hiring him to do a job, causing it to fail, then
>>suing him to obtain the trademark, and therefore the right to own the
>>domain names.  The trademark has not been enforced, and it would be hard
>>to enforce at this stage, but I think it would be effective in gaining
>>control of the domain names.
>>
>>o  Patents
>>
>>Most technology people agree the software patent system is broken, but
>>it could be a potent weapon against us, though we have shown we can
>>efficiently remove patent issue from our code.
>>
>>
>>There is probably nothing Oracle can do to permanently harm us, but
>>there are a variety of things they can do to temporarily slow us down,
>>and it is likely a attempt will be made in the future.  There are also
>>possible threats to PostgreSQL support companies, though they are
>>somewhat independent of the project.
>>
>>-- 
>>  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
>>  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
>>  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
>>  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073
>>
>>---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
>>TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate
>>       subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@postgresql.org so that your
>>       message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
>>
>>    
>>
>
>  
>

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Marc G. Fournier <scrappy@postgresql.org> — 2005-10-12T22:18:16Z

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Jussi Mikkola wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Well, if the PostgreSQL developers would be hired away from the project with 
> big money, would that not mean, that the project would be a good path to earn 
> a lot of money. So, new talented developers could join the project and see 
> that as a path to high salary jobs??

Wow, what a twisted way to look at it ... not entirely inaccurate, but 
twisted :)


----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Jan Wieck <janwieck@yahoo.com> — 2005-10-13T00:03:22Z

On 10/12/2005 6:18 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Jussi Mikkola wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> Well, if the PostgreSQL developers would be hired away from the project with 
>> big money, would that not mean, that the project would be a good path to earn 
>> a lot of money. So, new talented developers could join the project and see 
>> that as a path to high salary jobs??
> 
> Wow, what a twisted way to look at it ... not entirely inaccurate, but 
> twisted :)

Oracle could even develop an exceptional interest in keeping PostgreSQL 
alive as it's "future DB engineer forge".


Jan

-- 
#======================================================================#
# It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than for being right. #
# Let's break this rule - forgive me.                                  #
#================================================== JanWieck@Yahoo.com #

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Rich Shepard <rshepard@appl-ecosys.com> — 2005-10-13T00:38:39Z

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Jan Wieck wrote:

> Oracle could even develop an exceptional interest in keeping PostgreSQL
> alive as it's "future DB engineer forge".

Jan,

   Or, to demonstrate that it's not a monopoly. There will be two choices:
Oracle and postgres.

Rich

-- 
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President     |   Author of "Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM) |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic"
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517         Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Marc G. Fournier <scrappy@postgresql.org> — 2005-10-13T00:47:26Z

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Jan Wieck wrote:

> On 10/12/2005 6:18 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Jussi Mikkola wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> Well, if the PostgreSQL developers would be hired away from the project 
>>> with big money, would that not mean, that the project would be a good path 
>>> to earn a lot of money. So, new talented developers could join the project 
>>> and see that as a path to high salary jobs??
>> 
>> Wow, what a twisted way to look at it ... not entirely inaccurate, but 
>> twisted :)
>
> Oracle could even develop an exceptional interest in keeping PostgreSQL alive 
> as it's "future DB engineer forge".

Definitely ... get new developers involved over here to 'cut their teeth' 
and then pull them over there once they are through the teething period :) 
Or, encourage them to work here wihle still in University, learn DB 
internals ...

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Matthew Terenzio <matt@jobsforge.com> — 2005-10-13T01:50:19Z

As much as I respect Marc and Postgresql.org, I can't see Oracle hiring 
him away as a "killer" threat to the community. People would set up 
camp somewhere else, like Command Prompt. It would hurt things for a 
while but the software is too important to too many to be killed by a 
domain name or person.

On Oct 12, 2005, at 8:47 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Jan Wieck wrote:
>
>> On 10/12/2005 6:18 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Jussi Mikkola wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>> Well, if the PostgreSQL developers would be hired away from the 
>>>> project with big money, would that not mean, that the project would 
>>>> be a good path to earn a lot of money. So, new talented developers 
>>>> could join the project and see that as a path to high salary jobs??
>>> Wow, what a twisted way to look at it ... not entirely inaccurate, 
>>> but twisted :)
>>
>> Oracle could even develop an exceptional interest in keeping 
>> PostgreSQL alive as it's "future DB engineer forge".
>
> Definitely ... get new developers involved over here to 'cut their 
> teeth' and then pull them over there once they are through the 
> teething period :) Or, encourage them to work here wihle still in 
> University, learn DB internals ...
>
> ----
> Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services 
> (http://www.hub.org)
> Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 
> 7615664
>
> ---------------------------(end of 
> broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
>       choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
>       match
>

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> — 2005-10-13T02:02:34Z

Matthew Terenzio wrote:
> As much as I respect Marc and Postgresql.org, I can't see Oracle hiring 
> him away as a "killer" threat to the community. People would set up 
> camp somewhere else, like Command Prompt. It would hurt things for a 
> while but the software is too important to too many to be killed by a 
> domain name or person.

Right, all these damages are temporary, which is probably why we haven't
been attacked yet.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------


> 
> On Oct 12, 2005, at 8:47 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Jan Wieck wrote:
> >
> >> On 10/12/2005 6:18 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Jussi Mikkola wrote:
> >>>> Hi,
> >>>> Well, if the PostgreSQL developers would be hired away from the 
> >>>> project with big money, would that not mean, that the project would 
> >>>> be a good path to earn a lot of money. So, new talented developers 
> >>>> could join the project and see that as a path to high salary jobs??
> >>> Wow, what a twisted way to look at it ... not entirely inaccurate, 
> >>> but twisted :)
> >>
> >> Oracle could even develop an exceptional interest in keeping 
> >> PostgreSQL alive as it's "future DB engineer forge".
> >
> > Definitely ... get new developers involved over here to 'cut their 
> > teeth' and then pull them over there once they are through the 
> > teething period :) Or, encourage them to work here wihle still in 
> > University, learn DB internals ...
> >
> > ----
> > Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services 
> > (http://www.hub.org)
> > Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 
> > 7615664
> >
> > ---------------------------(end of 
> > broadcast)---------------------------
> > TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
> >       choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
> >       match
> >
> 
> 
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ?
> 
>                http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq
> 

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2005-10-13T02:17:35Z

Matthew Terenzio <matt@jobsforge.com> writes:
> As much as I respect Marc and Postgresql.org, I can't see Oracle hiring 
> him away as a "killer" threat to the community. People would set up 
> camp somewhere else, like Command Prompt. It would hurt things for a 
> while but the software is too important to too many to be killed by a 
> domain name or person.

Yeah, I was thinking that myself: even if a hostile group managed to
obtain control of the trademark and/or domain name, they could not kill
the project.  We'd just regroup under a new name --- it'd slow us down
for a bit, sure, but no more.  The project name has changed once
already, remember.

The only serious threat I see on the horizon is patent issues.  Again,
I don't think that could kill us over the long term --- we could surely
write our way out of any noncritical patents (see recent ARC fiasco for
a fire drill of this nature), and we ourselves are prior art with which
to defeat any patents on critical algorithms.  A patent lawsuit could
certainly hurt us, if only by soaking up the time and attention of key
developers, but I don't think it could kill the project.

			regards, tom lane

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> — 2005-10-13T02:19:22Z

Bruce Momjian wrote:

>Matthew Terenzio wrote:
>  
>
>>As much as I respect Marc and Postgresql.org, I can't see Oracle hiring 
>>him away as a "killer" threat to the community. People would set up 
>>camp somewhere else, like Command Prompt. It would hurt things for a 
>>while but the software is too important to too many to be killed by a 
>>domain name or person.
>>    
>>
>
>Right, all these damages are temporary, which is probably why we haven't
>been attacked yet.
>
>
>  
>
There are also logistical problems with attacking PostgreSQL because 
nobody owns it.
MySQL was an easy target because of the way they negotiated their 
business contracts
for use of Innodb.

PostgreSQL doesn't suffer from that. Our only real, substantiated 
concern that I can see
is the potential for the Software Patent crap.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

-- 
Your PostgreSQL solutions company - Command Prompt, Inc. 1.800.492.2240
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Programming, 24x7 support
Managed Services, Shared and Dedicated Hosting
Co-Authors: plPHP, plPerlNG - http://www.commandprompt.com/

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> — 2005-10-13T02:26:32Z

Right.  Though there are attacks, there are no fatal attacks.  MySQL has
to make money, so they can have fatal attacks.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tom Lane wrote:
> Matthew Terenzio <matt@jobsforge.com> writes:
> > As much as I respect Marc and Postgresql.org, I can't see Oracle hiring 
> > him away as a "killer" threat to the community. People would set up 
> > camp somewhere else, like Command Prompt. It would hurt things for a 
> > while but the software is too important to too many to be killed by a 
> > domain name or person.
> 
> Yeah, I was thinking that myself: even if a hostile group managed to
> obtain control of the trademark and/or domain name, they could not kill
> the project.  We'd just regroup under a new name --- it'd slow us down
> for a bit, sure, but no more.  The project name has changed once
> already, remember.
> 
> The only serious threat I see on the horizon is patent issues.  Again,
> I don't think that could kill us over the long term --- we could surely
> write our way out of any noncritical patents (see recent ARC fiasco for
> a fire drill of this nature), and we ourselves are prior art with which
> to defeat any patents on critical algorithms.  A patent lawsuit could
> certainly hurt us, if only by soaking up the time and attention of key
> developers, but I don't think it could kill the project.
> 
> 			regards, tom lane
> 
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
>        choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
>        match
> 

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Marc G. Fournier <scrappy@postgresql.org> — 2005-10-13T02:30:40Z

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> PostgreSQL doesn't suffer from that. Our only real, substantiated 
> concern that I can see is the potential for the Software Patent crap.

Stupid question here ... if Oracle came at us with "the Software Patent 
crap", is there any "reasonable time" provided to remove it?  We've 
already shown in the past that that isn't a big hurdle, with the ARC 
stuff, so am just curiuos as to how big a thing the Patent stuff is, or 
does even that fall under 'temporary setback / inconvience'?

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> — 2005-10-13T02:55:43Z

Marc G. Fournier wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>
>> PostgreSQL doesn't suffer from that. Our only real, substantiated 
>> concern that I can see is the potential for the Software Patent crap.
>
>
> Stupid question here ... if Oracle came at us with "the Software 
> Patent crap", is there any "reasonable time" provided to remove it?  
> We've already shown in the past that that isn't a big hurdle, with the 
> ARC stuff, so am just curiuos as to how big a thing the Patent stuff 
> is, or does even that fall under 'temporary setback / inconvience'?

Depends on them. They can request "Injunctive Relief" but they have a 
whole bunch of other things they would have to get around... They are 
more likely to go after
Command Prompt, Pervasive and most like EnterpriseDB than anybody.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake


>
> ----
> Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services 
> (http://www.hub.org)
> Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 
> 7615664
>
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-- 
Your PostgreSQL solutions company - Command Prompt, Inc. 1.800.492.2240
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Programming, 24x7 support
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Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Mike Nolan <nolan@gw.tssi.com> — 2005-10-13T03:06:55Z

> Stupid question here ... if Oracle came at us with "the Software Patent 
> crap", is there any "reasonable time" provided to remove it?  We've 
> already shown in the past that that isn't a big hurdle, with the ARC 
> stuff, so am just curiuos as to how big a thing the Patent stuff is, or 
> does even that fall under 'temporary setback / inconvience'?

That may depend on what's been patented.  In my opinions (and more 
importantly in the eyes of more than a few intellectual property attorneys)
the patent office has granted some very dubious software patents, and a 
deep pockets patent holder would probably have the upper hand wielding them.
--
Mike Nolan

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Andreas Pflug <pgadmin@pse-consulting.de> — 2005-10-13T08:52:58Z

Jan Wieck wrote:
> On 10/12/2005 6:18 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Jussi Mikkola wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Well, if the PostgreSQL developers would be hired away from the 
>>> project with big money, would that not mean, that the project would 
>>> be a good path to earn a lot of money. So, new talented developers 
>>> could join the project and see that as a path to high salary jobs??
>>
>>
>> Wow, what a twisted way to look at it ... not entirely inaccurate, but 
>> twisted :)
> 
> 
> Oracle could even develop an exceptional interest in keeping PostgreSQL 
> alive as it's "future DB engineer forge".

Looks like a good reason why Oracle should sponsor PostgreSQL heavily :-)

Regards,
Andreas

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@pervasive.com> — 2005-10-13T17:07:30Z

On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 08:52:58AM +0000, Andreas Pflug wrote:
> Jan Wieck wrote:
> >Oracle could even develop an exceptional interest in keeping PostgreSQL 
> >alive as it's "future DB engineer forge".
> 
> Looks like a good reason why Oracle should sponsor PostgreSQL heavily :-)

Heh. This gives me the thought that Oracle might be going after MySQL
for no other reason than to stop them from instilling really bad ideas
into people who then think they can design/develop against databases.
Somehow I can see Tom Kyte (of AskTom fame) doing a dance around his
office...
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Ron Mayer <rm_pg@cheapcomplexdevices.com> — 2005-10-14T17:18:46Z

Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> 
>> PostgreSQL doesn't suffer from that. Our only real, substantiated 
>> concern that I can see is the potential for the Software Patent crap.
> 
> 
> Stupid question here ... if Oracle came at us with "the Software Patent 
> crap", 

Personally I think it's quite unlikely Oracle would try attacking
any F/OSS project on patent grounds.   They've pretty much bet
the company on Linux (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5825433.html
"Within the next 5 years, half of Oracle's customers may be running
Linux, company President Charles Phillips has predicted".  With
the sensitivity in the community that SCO/Baystar-and-friends created
I think that it'd be suicidal for Oracle to start any sort of
patent-vs-F/OSS war.  Imagine the speculation of whether they'd
go after Linux itself next.........

My guess is that Oracle simply recognized that the Innobase guys
were solid database engineers with a product with a growing customer
base in a niche (low end databases) that Oracle didn't have a large
presence.

Therefore it made sense from both a recruiting and a
business growth opportunity to acquire them.

On those grounds I could certainly see Oracle buying successful
postgresql-based companies -- again, for both the talented people
and the proven market for those products.   But rather than
harm the project, I imagine that would simply create incentives
for other talented database developers to join the project.

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> — 2005-10-14T17:54:24Z

> Personally I think it's quite unlikely Oracle would try attacking
> any F/OSS project on patent grounds.   They've pretty much bet
> the company on Linux (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5825433.html

Linux isn't a competitor, PostgreSQL is. 

> My guess is that Oracle simply recognized that the Innobase guys
> were solid database engineers with a product with a growing customer
> base in a niche (low end databases) that Oracle didn't have a large
> presence.

Oh if the world were that nice. Yes you could be correct but my very
strong opinion on this is that they did it because it can set back
MySQL for 18-24 months.

> 
> Therefore it made sense from both a recruiting and a
> business growth opportunity to acquire them.

Oracle isn't interested in the 395.00 market.

> 
> On those grounds I could certainly see Oracle buying successful
> postgresql-based companies -- again, for both the talented people
> and the proven market for those products.  

For people maybe, but they really don't need the database.

Sincerely,
Joshua D. Drake


>  But rather than
> harm the project, I imagine that would simply create incentives
> for other talented database developers to join the project.
> 
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
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Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@g2switchworks.com> — 2005-10-14T18:27:45Z

On Fri, 2005-10-14 at 12:18, Ron Mayer wrote:
> Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> > On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> > 
> >> PostgreSQL doesn't suffer from that. Our only real, substantiated 
> >> concern that I can see is the potential for the Software Patent crap.
> > 
> > 
> > Stupid question here ... if Oracle came at us with "the Software Patent 
> > crap", 
> 
> Personally I think it's quite unlikely Oracle would try attacking
> any F/OSS project on patent grounds.   They've pretty much bet
> the company on Linux (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5825433.html
> "Within the next 5 years, half of Oracle's customers may be running
> Linux, company President Charles Phillips has predicted".  With
> the sensitivity in the community that SCO/Baystar-and-friends created
> I think that it'd be suicidal for Oracle to start any sort of
> patent-vs-F/OSS war.  Imagine the speculation of whether they'd
> go after Linux itself next.........

But that's the beauty of buying innobase.  Oracle can attack MySQL and
still be the F/OSS hero!  It's simple.  Release the innodb code base
under GPL only, no commercial license.  Anyone who wants it can use it,
but they have to only use it in GPL projects.

Then, MySQL has a hard decision, do they continue to make a GPL version
of MySQL with innodb and remove the innodb handler from their
commercially licensed version of MySQL, or do they pull it altogether.

If they leave it in the GPL version then they are encouraging their
customers to rexamine their usage and try to use the GPL version.

If they pull it, they encourage a fork of the code base by another group
who might want to keep innodb and doesn't mind it being all GPL.

Of course, this group could then architect a LGPL connect library on
their own, and then MySQL would be freely usable with commercial
software like it once was.

Boom, MySQL loses large amounts of their funding, and Oracle wins a
public relations coup by releasing innobase under the GPL and hosting
the project on their servers.

> My guess is that Oracle simply recognized that the Innobase guys
> were solid database engineers with a product with a growing customer
> base in a niche (low end databases) that Oracle didn't have a large
> presence.

There are, I believe, exactly ONE innobase guy, the primary developer. 
Nice guy, but there are still a lot of  issues to be worked out in
innodb.  Hopefully, Oracle can provide the funding to make it work.

It would be great if Oracle paid to fork MySQL to a pure GPL product,
producing a new connection lib under LGPL, and hosting the whole thing
as a version of MySQL that ONLY uses innodb.

By forcing it to use one and only one table handler, they would then
focus development effort on SQL compliance, proper operation, and adding
features that work with innodb, like full text searching.  Since the
basic database would retain a good amount of interoperability with the
old MySQL, this new database could easily take away a fair share of
their market.  Then, Oracle could sell support contracts, not licenses,
and back them up with their rather large corporate infrastructure.

> On those grounds I could certainly see Oracle buying successful
> postgresql-based companies -- again, for both the talented people
> and the proven market for those products.   But rather than
> harm the project, I imagine that would simply create incentives
> for other talented database developers to join the project.

Yeah, I'd see it something like that, with the focus being on selling
consulting services for folks using PostgreSQL...

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2005-10-14T18:56:36Z

Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@g2switchworks.com> writes:
> It would be great if Oracle paid to fork MySQL to a pure GPL product,
> producing a new connection lib under LGPL, and hosting the whole thing
> as a version of MySQL that ONLY uses innodb.

> By forcing it to use one and only one table handler, they would then
> focus development effort on SQL compliance, proper operation, and adding
> features that work with innodb, like full text searching.  Since the
> basic database would retain a good amount of interoperability with the
> old MySQL, this new database could easily take away a fair share of
> their market.  Then, Oracle could sell support contracts, not licenses,
> and back them up with their rather large corporate infrastructure.

That's a really interesting angle --- not only does Oracle get rid of
what they may or may not see as serious competition, but they get a
chance to make some money at the same time.  I'm not convinced about the
"only one table handler" part of your story.  Oracle certainly has the
resources to fix up multiple handlers if they wish, and they wouldn't
want to leave a loophole that MySQL AB could use to claim that their
version is better.  The only one I'd see them dropping, in this
scenario, is BDB (unless they could buy out Sleepycat too, which is
perhaps not out of the question).

I've been trying to figure out what it is that Oracle gets out of this,
assuming that they don't see MySQL as a serious threat to their core
business.  The most they can do is force MySQL AB to waste a year or so
reimplementing something equivalent to InnoDB; which would hurt them but
it's hardly likely to kill them.  But with your scenario Oracle might
actually make money out of the deal, which makes it make some sense.

			regards, tom lane

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Ron Mayer <rm_pg@cheapcomplexdevices.com> — 2005-10-14T20:02:00Z

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>[Ron Mayer wrote]
>>...Oracle...recognized...solid database engineers with
>>a product with a growing customer base...
>>...made sense from both a recruiting and a
>>business growth opportunity to acquire them.
> 
> Oracle isn't interested in the 395.00 market.

I think it's the larger MySQL customers (US Census Department, etc)
that they are interested in.

If the Census Department needs to look outside Oracle for low-end
databases, that opens the door to Access / SQL-Server / etc - which
really is a threat to Oracle.

On the other hand, if the Census Department can get all of their
database needs from Oracle, it's a much safer world for Oracle Corp.

>>On those grounds I could certainly see Oracle buying successful
>>postgresql-based companies -- again, for both the talented people
>>and the proven market for those products.  
> 
> For people maybe, but they really don't need the database.

Not the database itself, as much as the business knowledge of
how to sell low-end databases.

MySQL has a nice set of reference customers (MySQL AB's claims
include Google, US Census Bureau, Yahoo, Sabre, CERN, NASA, Associated
Press, Macys, Cox, Cable&Wireless, Nokia, Cisco, Sony, etc) - along
with a proven business structure (combination of product + marketing)
that appeals enough to those customers to buy it.  Sure, Oracle was
probably in 90% of those places anyway - but clearly those existing
customeres saw the need for a low-end database that wasn't covered
by Oracle's existing offerings.   Even if Oracle gets little revenue
from the low-end-DB-sales to those guys; if it keeps integration
between the Census Department's MySQL databases and Oracle-Expensive
working reliably, it's worth doing.

I'd suspect that any single postgresql-support company that had a
similar customer list would get offers from Oracle as well

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> — 2005-10-14T20:24:05Z

> MySQL has a nice set of reference customers (MySQL AB's claims
> include Google, US Census Bureau, Yahoo, Sabre, CERN, NASA, Associated
> Press, Macys, Cox, Cable&Wireless, Nokia, Cisco, Sony, etc) - along
> with a proven business structure (combination of product + marketing)

You do know that many of those listed above also use PostgreSQL :) 

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

-- 
Your PostgreSQL solutions company - Command Prompt, Inc. 1.800.492.2240
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Programming, 24x7 support
Managed Services, Shared and Dedicated Hosting
Co-Authors: plPHP, plPerlNG - http://www.commandprompt.com/

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca> — 2005-10-14T20:26:36Z

On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 01:02:00PM -0700, Ron Mayer wrote:
> I'd suspect that any single postgresql-support company that had a
> similar customer list would get offers from Oracle as well

PostgreSQL support companies don't have the leverage that Oracle and
MySQL do to get their clients to "come out of the closet".  There
_are_ such customer lists, but the license for PostgreSQL doesn't
entail that those customers be used as marketing fodder.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
"The year's penultimate month" is not in truth a good way of saying
November.
		--H.W. Fowler

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Jeffrey Melloy <jmelloy@visualdistortion.org> — 2005-10-14T21:01:05Z

Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
>> Matthew Terenzio wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> As much as I respect Marc and Postgresql.org, I can't see Oracle 
>>> hiring him away as a "killer" threat to the community. People would 
>>> set up camp somewhere else, like Command Prompt. It would hurt 
>>> things for a while but the software is too important to too many to 
>>> be killed by a domain name or person.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Right, all these damages are temporary, which is probably why we haven't
>> been attacked yet.
>>
>>
>>  
>>
> There are also logistical problems with attacking PostgreSQL because 
> nobody owns it.
> MySQL was an easy target because of the way they negotiated their 
> business contracts
> for use of Innodb.
>
> PostgreSQL doesn't suffer from that. Our only real, substantiated 
> concern that I can see
> is the potential for the Software Patent crap.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Joshua D. Drake
>
But what if they came in sideways and bought Command Prompt?  (As an 
example.)  You could do a lot more to destroy PostgreSQL's market in the 
business world by destroying the various support mechanisms.  Your 
business is much closer to eating their lunch than PostgreSQL itself.  
So what if they bought Command Prompt (or someone else like it) and then 
cut it off at the knees?    No one ever accused Larry Ellison of being 
dumb ... different strategies for different opponents.

Jeff

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> — 2005-10-14T21:28:52Z

> But what if they came in sideways and bought Command Prompt?

Well then I would be sitting on a beach in New Zealend with an umbrella
drink :)

>   (As an 
> example.)  You could do a lot more to destroy PostgreSQL's market in the 
> business world by destroying the various support mechanisms.  Your 
> business is much closer to eating their lunch than PostgreSQL itself.  

That is a farily good point but one of the beautiful things about Open
Source is that even if they bought Command Prompt, they would also have
to buy Pervasive and EnterpriseDB and GreenPlum and SRA.

And then -- by doing so they are just opening the market for a new set
of companies to start supporting PostgreSQL.

> So what if they bought Command Prompt (or someone else like it) and then 
> cut it off at the knees?    No one ever accused Larry Ellison of being 
> dumb ... different strategies for different opponents.

No, Larry isn't dumb. You don't get to be the second richest man in the
world by being dumb. However he is very strategic and I don't see (at
this point) a strategic reason to attack PostgreSQL via Oracle.

PostgreSQL at this point is actually a good value add to the Oracle
proposition. In 5 years we are probably going to be a immediate direct
threat but not right now.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake



> 
> Jeff
> 
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
-- 
Your PostgreSQL solutions company - Command Prompt, Inc. 1.800.492.2240
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Programming, 24x7 support
Managed Services, Shared and Dedicated Hosting
Co-Authors: plPHP, plPerlNG - http://www.commandprompt.com/

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Ron Mayer <rm_pg@cheapcomplexdevices.com> — 2005-10-15T14:58:50Z

Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 01:02:00PM -0700, Ron Mayer wrote:
>> 
>>>I'd suspect that any single postgresql-support company that had a
>>>similar customer list would get offers from Oracle as well
>> 
>> PostgreSQL support companies don't have the leverage that Oracle and
>> MySQL do to get their clients to "come out of the closet".  There
>> _are_ such customer lists, but the license for PostgreSQL doesn't
>> entail that those customers be used as marketing fodder.

Agreed, but I think my point still stands -- any PostgreSQL company
with such customer lists who wants to get bought by Oracle could
probably do so easily just by firing off an email to the right person.

Oracle likes sales channels into such customers; and likes
growing through acquisitions.

Heck, they bought 10 (11 counting Innobase?) companies already
during just 6 months of this year:

  http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1861215,00.asp
  " Oracle announced its 10th acquisition in six months
   Tuesday at its annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco."

And they don't even seem to care if the underlying engine
is theirs or a competitor.  They probably even support
DB2 now, thanks to their Siebel, Retek, I-Flex and
PeopleSoft acquisitions.

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>>>MySQL has a nice set of reference customers (MySQL AB's claims
>>>include Google, US Census Bureau, Yahoo, Sabre, CERN, NASA, Associated
>>>Press, Macys, Cox, Cable&Wireless, Nokia, Cisco, Sony, etc) - along
>>>with a proven business structure (combination of product + marketing)
>> 
>> You do know that many of those listed above also use PostgreSQL :) 

Sure.  I know that some of them (Cisco, at least) sell products
based on postgresql; and from first hand experience know another
uses it for some really big databases.  I'm sure most of them
also use BDB and Access and their-own flat-files as well.

The difference is when the US Census Bureau (a heavy Oracle
user) has a many million dollar budget for databases, and requests
bids from dtabase vendors.  It would be very nice for Oracle to
be able to say things like "yes, we can supply all your needs as
opposed to having to go to multiple vendors".

Whether the census department sues PostgreSQL or GPL-MySQL or BDB
internally doesn't affect Oracle much, since the dollars are
really in the high-end systems.  But conceding that the Census
department needs to look elsewhere for commercial database
vendors (which opens the door for those guys with Access/SQLServer)
to meet their database needs must really hurt.

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@pervasive.com> — 2005-10-15T23:34:00Z

On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 01:24:05PM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> 
> > MySQL has a nice set of reference customers (MySQL AB's claims
> > include Google, US Census Bureau, Yahoo, Sabre, CERN, NASA, Associated
> > Press, Macys, Cox, Cable&Wireless, Nokia, Cisco, Sony, etc) - along
> > with a proven business structure (combination of product + marketing)
> 
> You do know that many of those listed above also use PostgreSQL :) 

Do we know that for sure? It'd be damn nice to be able to put that kind
of info on our website...
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@metatrontech.com> — 2005-10-16T04:20:41Z

Tom Lane wrote:

>That's a really interesting angle --- not only does Oracle get rid of
>what they may or may not see as serious competition, but they get a
>chance to make some money at the same time.  I'm not convinced about the
>"only one table handler" part of your story.  Oracle certainly has the
>resources to fix up multiple handlers if they wish, and they wouldn't
>want to leave a loophole that MySQL AB could use to claim that their
>version is better.  The only one I'd see them dropping, in this
>scenario, is BDB (unless they could buy out Sleepycat too, which is
>perhaps not out of the question).
>  
>
There is another possibility too...  I don't really see Oracle trying to 
force MySQL to be GPL-only because that would have the potential to 
materially harm their own market position.  Kill MySQL AB and just maybe 
the community might become less MySQL AB-centric.

What is a larger possibility is to use this to contain MySQL AB.  Jack 
up the license fees to the point that MySQL is no longer the 
super-low-cost alternative.  This would also cut into MySQL's 
profitability at the same time and help slow down the pace of development.

The only real downside is that I could see MySQL developing a 
FirebirdSQL table handler if too much pressure is put on them.  This 
might actually work OK since Firebird has an embeddable engine.  If they 
do this then Oracle might end up with basically the personnel from the 
Innobase acquisition and very little else.  Of course MySQL has 
progressed to the point where larger license fees might not alienate too 
many customers.

>I've been trying to figure out what it is that Oracle gets out of this,
>assuming that they don't see MySQL as a serious threat to their core
>business.  The most they can do is force MySQL AB to waste a year or so
>reimplementing something equivalent to InnoDB; which would hurt them but
>it's hardly likely to kill them.
>
A year delay with MySQL's pace of development and track record?

>  But with your scenario Oracle might
>actually make money out of the deal, which makes it make some sense.
>  
>
I was assuming that this deal was primarily done to scare customers away 
from using MySQL.  The timing could not have been more deliberate-- 
right before 5.0 is supposed to be released.  I think that the first 
message was to scare business customers away from MySQL.  Secondly they 
may want an additional inroad into FOSS.  Third, they may be after 
personnel (i.e the buyout may be really a hiring bonus).

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Jeff Davis <jdavis-pgsql@empires.org> — 2005-10-16T16:48:01Z

> The only real downside is that I could see MySQL developing a 
> FirebirdSQL table handler if too much pressure is put on them.  This 
> might actually work OK since Firebird has an embeddable engine.  If they 
> do this then Oracle might end up with basically the personnel from the 
> Innobase acquisition and very little else.  Of course MySQL has 
> progressed to the point where larger license fees might not alienate too 
> many customers.
> 

Does the FirebirdSQL license allow MySQL AB to embed firebird and then 
sell it commercially? Does any one entity own the copyright to 
FirebirdSQL so that they could dual license it to MySQL AB?

If not, what's the advantage to MySQL using FirebirdSQL as opposed to, 
say, PostgreSQL?

And as someone mentioned in a related comment, what does MySQL bring to 
the table? Everyone would know that MySQL DB was really just FirebirdSQL 
with a different frontend. The PR would be devestating to MySQL AB. Not 
quite as bad as if they used PostgreSQL, but still bad.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Thomas Hallgren <thomas.hallgren@home.se> — 2005-10-16T19:11:43Z

> There is another possibility too...  I don't really see Oracle trying to 
> force MySQL to be GPL-only because that would have the potential to 
> materially harm their own market position.  Kill MySQL AB and just maybe 
> the community might become less MySQL AB-centric.
> 
> What is a larger possibility is to use this to contain MySQL AB.  Jack 
> up the license fees to the point that MySQL is no longer the 
> super-low-cost alternative.  This would also cut into MySQL's 
> profitability at the same time and help slow down the pace of development.
> 
I think Oracle will buy MySQL too eventually and then pose that as a low-cost alternative. 
They started with InnoDB because that is likely to lower the price tag of MySQL more then 
they paid for InnoDB. MySQL's existing customer base is very attractive to Oracle.

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@metatrontech.com> — 2005-10-16T21:00:28Z

Jeff Davis wrote:

>
>> The only real downside is that I could see MySQL developing a 
>> FirebirdSQL table handler if too much pressure is put on them.  This 
>> might actually work OK since Firebird has an embeddable engine.  If 
>> they do this then Oracle might end up with basically the personnel 
>> from the Innobase acquisition and very little else.  Of course MySQL 
>> has progressed to the point where larger license fees might not 
>> alienate too many customers.
>>
>
> Does the FirebirdSQL license allow MySQL AB to embed firebird and then 
> sell it commercially? Does any one entity own the copyright to 
> FirebirdSQL so that they could dual license it to MySQL AB?

Yes.  It is a modified Mozilla Public License which allows for embedding 
in proprietary applications.  However, it is LGPL-like in that they have 
to provide the source code of the Firebird component and any 
modifications...  They do *not* have to relicense all of MySQL to use 
it.  The copyright is owned by the community.

>
> If not, what's the advantage to MySQL using FirebirdSQL as opposed to, 
> say, PostgreSQL?

I assume you mean if they are allowed to use it.  PostgreSQL really is 
not designed to be embedded in applications.  Firebird has that 
possibility...  You do have some issues.  Last I checked there was no 
equivalent to the text datatype, but that was with 1.0, and they are up 
to 1.5 now (Firebird seems to have no comprehensive documentation on 
their site).

>
> And as someone mentioned in a related comment, what does MySQL bring 
> to the table? Everyone would know that MySQL DB was really just 
> FirebirdSQL with a different frontend. The PR would be devestating to 
> MySQL AB. Not quite as bad as if they used PostgreSQL, but still bad.

So their options would be?

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@travelamericas.com> — 2005-10-16T21:05:17Z

Joshua D. Drake wrote:

>>But what if they came in sideways and bought Command Prompt?
>>    
>>
>
>Well then I would be sitting on a beach in New Zealend with an umbrella
>drink :)
>
>  
>
>>  (As an 
>>example.)  You could do a lot more to destroy PostgreSQL's market in the 
>>business world by destroying the various support mechanisms.  Your 
>>business is much closer to eating their lunch than PostgreSQL itself.  
>>    
>>
>
>That is a farily good point but one of the beautiful things about Open
>Source is that even if they bought Command Prompt, they would also have
>to buy Pervasive and EnterpriseDB and GreenPlum and SRA.
>
>And then -- by doing so they are just opening the market for a new set
>of companies to start supporting PostgreSQL.
>
>  
>
>>So what if they bought Command Prompt (or someone else like it) and then 
>>cut it off at the knees?    No one ever accused Larry Ellison of being 
>>dumb ... different strategies for different opponents.
>>    
>>
>
>No, Larry isn't dumb. You don't get to be the second richest man in the
>world by being dumb. However he is very strategic and I don't see (at
>this point) a strategic reason to attack PostgreSQL via Oracle.
>  
>
I don't think that PostgreSQL is really on Oracle's radar at the moment.

>PostgreSQL at this point is actually a good value add to the Oracle
>proposition. In 5 years we are probably going to be a immediate direct
>threat but not right now.
>  
>
Note that it was a few years ago that MySQL first popped up on Oracle's 
radar screen enough for them to add migration tools helping people move 
from MySQL to Oracle.  I don't see such tools available currently for 
PostgreSQL to Oracle migrations at the moment.  So I suspect that we are 
still seen as the little guy :-)  The difference is that while we have a 
smaller number of large users, MySQL has a larger number of smaller 
users so they technically have better market share numbers *and* they 
have better plublicity.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Martin Marques <martin@bugs.unl.edu.ar> — 2005-10-16T23:12:10Z

El Dom 16 Oct 2005 01:20, Chris Travers escribió:
> 
> The only real downside is that I could see MySQL developing a 
> FirebirdSQL table handler if too much pressure is put on them.  This 
> might actually work OK since Firebird has an embeddable engine.  If they 
> do this then Oracle might end up with basically the personnel from the 
> Innobase acquisition and very little else.  Of course MySQL has 
> progressed to the point where larger license fees might not alienate too 
> many customers.

I'm not sure, as FireBird has a very difficult to understand license, but 
could they enforce there commercial license with the FireBird engine (if they 
have it)?

-- 
select 'mmarques' || '@' || 'unl.edu.ar' AS email;
---------------------------------------------------------
Martín Marqués          |   Programador, DBA
Centro de Telemática	|     Administrador
               Universidad Nacional
                    del Litoral
---------------------------------------------------------

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Martin Marques <martin@bugs.unl.edu.ar> — 2005-10-16T23:16:07Z

El Dom 16 Oct 2005 13:48, Jeff Davis escribió:
> 
> If not, what's the advantage to MySQL using FirebirdSQL as opposed to, 
> say, PostgreSQL?

I think it's stupid to even think about an emmbedded PostgreSQL in MySQL. The 
advantage of using InnoDB emmbeded in MySQL is that the former doesn't, 
AFAIK, an SQL languaje. So Innodb gives transaction and RI, and MySQL gives 
an SQL languaje.

Now, what would MySQL give PostgreSQL?

-- 
select 'mmarques' || '@' || 'unl.edu.ar' AS email;
---------------------------------------------------------
Martín Marqués          |   Programador, DBA
Centro de Telemática	|     Administrador
               Universidad Nacional
                    del Litoral
---------------------------------------------------------

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Jeff Davis <jdavis-pgsql@empires.org> — 2005-10-16T23:32:35Z

>>
>> And as someone mentioned in a related comment, what does MySQL bring 
>> to the table? Everyone would know that MySQL DB was really just 
>> FirebirdSQL with a different frontend. The PR would be devestating to 
>> MySQL AB. Not quite as bad as if they used PostgreSQL, but still bad.
> 
> 
> So their options would be?
> 

Good question. I'm sure MySQL AB would like to know. That's why MySQL DB 
users are so worried.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Jeff Davis <jdavis-pgsql@empires.org> — 2005-10-16T23:35:23Z

Martín Marqués wrote:
> El Dom 16 Oct 2005 13:48, Jeff Davis escribió:
> 
>>If not, what's the advantage to MySQL using FirebirdSQL as opposed to, 
>>say, PostgreSQL?
> 
> 
> I think it's stupid to even think about an emmbedded PostgreSQL in MySQL. The 
> advantage of using InnoDB emmbeded in MySQL is that the former doesn't, 
> AFAIK, an SQL languaje. So Innodb gives transaction and RI, and MySQL gives 
> an SQL languaje.
> 
> Now, what would MySQL give PostgreSQL?
> 

That was my point. FirebirdSQL already provides the SQL language, so 
what does MySQL offer that FirebirdSQL doesn't?

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Greg Sabino Mullane <greg@turnstep.com> — 2005-10-17T12:32:24Z

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


> I think Oracle will buy MySQL too eventually

No, MySQL AB is a private company and would probably never
sell to Oracle.

> They started with InnoDB because that is likely to lower the
> price tag of MySQL

You seem to misunderstand the power and wealth of Oracle. The cost of
buying MySQL AB would be insignificant to them.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200510170831
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
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Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Greg Sabino Mullane <greg@turnstep.com> — 2005-10-17T12:42:34Z

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


> I don't think that PostgreSQL is really on Oracle's radar at the moment.

Please don't make this assumption. PostgreSQL is *very* much on their radar,
and probably represents the biggest long-term threat to their core database
business at the moment. We got a hint of that during the .org bidding, but
for now it is in Oracle's interest not to call attention to PostgreSQL.
The last thing they want is publicity for the project. We may be a harder
target to hurt than MySQL, but we are a target, make no mistake about it.
I'm sure PostgreSQL is on the radar of Sybase, Microsoft, and IBM as well.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200510170838
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Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Thomas Hallgren <thomas.hallgren@home.se> — 2005-10-17T13:45:37Z

Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> 
>> I think Oracle will buy MySQL too eventually
> 
> No, MySQL AB is a private company and would probably never
> sell to Oracle.
> 
Huh? And since when are private companies not interested in being bought?

>> They started with InnoDB because that is likely to lower the
>> price tag of MySQL
> 
> You seem to misunderstand the power and wealth of Oracle. The cost of
> buying MySQL AB would be insignificant to them.
> 
I'm not sure the cost is insignificant to them, but even if it is, how do you figure that 
affects my idea negatively? I think it's the opposite. The acquired customer base is huge 
and that's what matters.

But, speculating is pointless. Time will tell.

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Marc G. Fournier <scrappy@postgresql.org> — 2005-10-17T13:58:17Z

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:

>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
>
>> I think Oracle will buy MySQL too eventually
>
> No, MySQL AB is a private company and would probably never
> sell to Oracle.
>
>> They started with InnoDB because that is likely to lower the
>> price tag of MySQL
>
> You seem to misunderstand the power and wealth of Oracle. The cost of
> buying MySQL AB would be insignificant to them.

Not only that, "potentially crippling" MySQL by pulling InnoDB out from 
under them would not only reduce MySQL's worth, but also has a massive 
potential of reducing their marketshare, long term.

Until MySQL has to re-negotiate their contract with Inno^H^H^H^HOracle, 
its all speculation though ... don't know when that comes due, but their 
might be enough time between now and then for MySQL to recover on their 
own (ie. come up with an alternative to InnoDB) ...

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Thomas Hallgren <thomas.hallgren@home.se> — 2005-10-17T14:17:50Z

Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
> 
>>
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>>
>>> I think Oracle will buy MySQL too eventually
>>
>> No, MySQL AB is a private company and would probably never
>> sell to Oracle.
>>
>>> They started with InnoDB because that is likely to lower the
>>> price tag of MySQL
>>
>> You seem to misunderstand the power and wealth of Oracle. The cost of
>> buying MySQL AB would be insignificant to them.
> 
> Not only that, "potentially crippling" MySQL by pulling InnoDB out from 
> under them would not only reduce MySQL's worth, but also has a massive 
> potential of reducing their marketshare, long term.
> 
And in what respect would that be negative for Oracle? There will be enough customers stuck 
on MySQL to make a purchase worth while anyway, reduced market share or not.

Oracle has two ways of making money from the InnoDB acquisition:
1. They charge for InnoDB licenses and thereby remove MySQL's profit. MySQL will probably 
die if they do this and their customers will seek alternatives. I think PostgreSQL is a far 
more likely alternative then Oracle. Especially if Oracle is the one who provokes the change.
2. They buy MySQL and charge the customers what they are charged today. Everyone is happy 
and Oracle just expanded their customer base.

> Until MySQL has to re-negotiate their contract with Inno^H^H^H^HOracle, 
> its all speculation though ... don't know when that comes due, but their 
> might be enough time between now and then for MySQL to recover on their 
> own (ie. come up with an alternative to InnoDB) ...
> 
In which case Oracle would gain nothing from its purchase of InnoDB. I don't see that as a 
very likely scenario.

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> — 2005-10-17T14:46:40Z

> Please don't make this assumption. PostgreSQL is *very* much on their radar,
> and probably represents the biggest long-term threat to their core database
> business at the moment. We got a hint of that during the .org bidding, but
> for now it is in Oracle's interest not to call attention to PostgreSQL.
> The last thing they want is publicity for the project. We may be a harder
> target to hurt than MySQL, but we are a target, make no mistake about it.
> I'm sure PostgreSQL is on the radar of Sybase, Microsoft, and IBM as well.

And they probably read every word we write ;)

Chris

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@g2switchworks.com> — 2005-10-17T17:01:29Z

On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 09:46, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> > Please don't make this assumption. PostgreSQL is *very* much on their radar,
> > and probably represents the biggest long-term threat to their core database
> > business at the moment. We got a hint of that during the .org bidding, but
> > for now it is in Oracle's interest not to call attention to PostgreSQL.
> > The last thing they want is publicity for the project. We may be a harder
> > target to hurt than MySQL, but we are a target, make no mistake about it.
> > I'm sure PostgreSQL is on the radar of Sybase, Microsoft, and IBM as well.
> 
> And they probably read every word we write ;)

I'd bet they read plenty, but don't necessarily understand a lot,
judging by their pitiful fud campaign when Afilias proposed using
postgresql as a database behind .org.  They tried to say PostgreSQL
didn't support transactions.  So, while we may be on their screens, and
I'm sure some marketeer there tries to keep up with some of the traffic
here, the actual comprehension seems pretty low judging by their past
statements.

Actually, I kinda hope it stays that way.

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> — 2005-10-17T17:14:57Z

tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us (Tom Lane) writes:
> I've been trying to figure out what it is that Oracle gets out of
> this, assuming that they don't see MySQL as a serious threat to
> their core business.  The most they can do is force MySQL AB to
> waste a year or so reimplementing something equivalent to InnoDB;
> which would hurt them but it's hardly likely to kill them.  But with
> your scenario Oracle might actually make money out of the deal,
> which makes it make some sense.

Well, Jan and I were puzzling over the whole "why MaxDB?" thing, and
the only way we were able to rationalize MySQL AB's involvement with
THAT was the theory that MySQL AB wants to become an alternative DB
backend vendor for SAP R/3.

Oracle is the main player there, and has been for a long time.

The whole thing about SAP AG buying up SAP-DB (which has become MaxDB)
was that they were "gaming" with Oracle over database licenses.
Having their own "free" alternative to Oracle represented a useful
tool when in license negotiations.

They then discovered that the codebase was something of a mess and
that they weren't interested in maintaining it, from whence came the
"freeing" of SAP-DB.

Where MySQL AB seems to fit into this is that they have a "barely
functional" DBMS engine that nonetheless happens to be nearly
functional enough to be usable as a backend for SAP R/3.

They were pretty proudly announcing at OSCON 2005 that they had enough
functionality to support R/3...

If MySQL AB has an *actively maintained* (unlike SAP-DB) database
engine, that makes them attractive to SAP AG whether as a business
partner or as a buyout target.  Either could be quite attractive to
owners and venture capital providers alike.

Of course, if the "ability to support R/3" requires InnoDB stuff, then
this means Oracle just did a nice job of cutting off this strategy...
-- 
output = ("cbbrowne" "@" "cbbrowne.com")
http://cbbrowne.com/info/unix.html
Mental health is overrated!!

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> — 2005-10-17T17:46:36Z

On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 22:46 +0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:

> And they probably read every word we write ;)

...and it will certainly slow them down :-)

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@travelamericas.com> — 2005-10-17T17:53:36Z

Thomas Hallgren wrote:

> Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>>> Hash: SHA1
>>>
>>>
>>>> I think Oracle will buy MySQL too eventually
>>>
>>>
>>> No, MySQL AB is a private company and would probably never
>>> sell to Oracle.
>>>
>>>> They started with InnoDB because that is likely to lower the
>>>> price tag of MySQL
>>>
>>>
>>> You seem to misunderstand the power and wealth of Oracle. The cost of
>>> buying MySQL AB would be insignificant to them.
>>
>>
>> Not only that, "potentially crippling" MySQL by pulling InnoDB out 
>> from under them would not only reduce MySQL's worth, but also has a 
>> massive potential of reducing their marketshare, long term.
>>
> And in what respect would that be negative for Oracle? There will be 
> enough customers stuck on MySQL to make a purchase worth while anyway, 
> reduced market share or not.
>
> Oracle has two ways of making money from the InnoDB acquisition:
> 1. They charge for InnoDB licenses and thereby remove MySQL's profit. 
> MySQL will probably die if they do this and their customers will seek 
> alternatives. I think PostgreSQL is a far more likely alternative then 
> Oracle. Especially if Oracle is the one who provokes the change.
> 2. They buy MySQL and charge the customers what they are charged 
> today. Everyone is happy and Oracle just expanded their customer base.

#2 could be done after #1.  Depending on the way Oracle proceeds, they 
might be able to do this without pissing off the community too much.

An extreme (and illegal) example of this sort of behavior was when AT&T 
executives used to provide a list of telco's they were interested in 
purchasing to J.P. Morgan and then J.P. Morgan would make sure their 
loans were called, bankrupting comptetitors, so AT&T could purchase them 
for pennies on the dollar (this was a major part of AT&T's earlier 
antitrust case, which resulted in a consent decree in 1956).

>
>
>> Until MySQL has to re-negotiate their contract with 
>> Inno^H^H^H^HOracle, its all speculation though ... don't know when 
>> that comes due, but their might be enough time between now and then 
>> for MySQL to recover on their own (ie. come up with an alternative to 
>> InnoDB) ...
>>
> In which case Oracle would gain nothing from its purchase of InnoDB. I 
> don't see that as a very likely scenario.

I think that MySQL was blindsided by this.  Just a little before this, 
they said that they wanted to be the Ikea of the database market in part 
because they didn't want to attract Oracle's attention...

Best Wishes,

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> — 2005-10-17T18:17:11Z

greg@turnstep.com ("Greg Sabino Mullane") writes:
>> I think Oracle will buy MySQL too eventually
>
> No, MySQL AB is a private company and would probably never
> sell to Oracle.

A significant portion of it belongs to a sizable set of venture
capital organizations to whom money talks pretty loudly.

A good offer from Oracle ought to be attractive to them...
-- 
(reverse (concatenate 'string "gro.mca" "@" "enworbbc"))
http://cbbrowne.com/info/spreadsheets.html
Rules of the Evil Overlord #25.  "No matter how well it would perform,
I  will never  construct any  sort  of machinery  which is  completely
indestructible  except  for   one  small  and  virtually  inaccessible
vulnerable spot." <http://www.eviloverlord.com/>

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@travelamericas.com> — 2005-10-17T18:18:19Z

Scott Marlowe wrote:

>I'd bet they read plenty, but don't necessarily understand a lot,
>judging by their pitiful fud campaign when Afilias proposed using
>postgresql as a database behind .org.  They tried to say PostgreSQL
>didn't support transactions.  So, while we may be on their screens, and
>I'm sure some marketeer there tries to keep up with some of the traffic
>here, the actual comprehension seems pretty low judging by their past
>statements.
>
>Actually, I kinda hope it stays that way.
>  
>
Ok.  I should have said "serious target."  MySQL has been a serious 
target for a number of years.  I think we are still the unknown bugaboo 
to them.

I.e. I see no evidence that Oracle is taking the PostgreSQL threat 
seriously, and the FUD campaign is more evidence that they don't (there 
are plenty of areas where Oracle has an edge over PostgreSQL-- the idea 
that "PostgreSQL doesn't support transactions" can only indicate that 
this was a cursory and hasty attack and maybe even a wakeup call for 
them, or maybe they got us mixed up with MySQL w/MyISAM).  The real 
question is whether after the .org campaign occurred, we are now a 
higher-profile target that is taken more seriously.  Personally, I would 
doubt it for reasons mentioned below.

The thing is, we may be a head-to-head competitor with Oracle in many 
areas, but we are pretty minor compared to Sybase, Microsoft, and IBM at 
the moment.   I.e. while we are an emerging threat, Oracle has plenty of 
clear and present threats to its  market share to deal with.  Therefore, 
I am willing to bet that we are probably a distant target, somewhere 
after Ingress II and maybe even Firebird/Interbase.  This is based on 
the assumption that in any significantly large corporation, there will 
be a lot of legacy competitive effort and that the rampup time to look 
at new threats is really pretty large.  I.e. at Microsoft when I left 
(2003), Java and Sun were still higher competitive priorities than Linux 
(and still very much in a middle-phase).  From what I have read after 
leaving, I think that Microsoft's strategy is still in an opening phase 
mostly consisting of GetTheFUD and internal product research.

MySQL is different.  They established a large user base early on, and 
people have a tendency (wrongly) to think of them as The Open Source 
RDBMS.  So I am willing to be that Oracle has been ramping up a 
competitive strategy against them for at least five years (they showed a 
clear competitive strategy against them as early as 2000).  The fact 
that they are an easier target complicates matters for them, but I think 
that this is more of a transition to an end-game strategy by Oracle than 
anything else.

I will be worried if and when Oracle demonstrates any intelligent 
competitive strategy against us.  A poorly orchestrated and hasty FUD 
campaign does not qualify.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

elein <elein@varlena.com> — 2005-10-17T18:20:00Z

On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 02:28:52PM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> 
> > But what if they came in sideways and bought Command Prompt?
> 
> Well then I would be sitting on a beach in New Zealend with an umbrella
> drink :)
> 
> >   (As an 
> > example.)  You could do a lot more to destroy PostgreSQL's market in the 
> > business world by destroying the various support mechanisms.  Your 
> > business is much closer to eating their lunch than PostgreSQL itself.  
> 
> That is a farily good point but one of the beautiful things about Open
> Source is that even if they bought Command Prompt, they would also have
> to buy Pervasive and EnterpriseDB and GreenPlum and SRA.
> 
> And then -- by doing so they are just opening the market for a new set
> of companies to start supporting PostgreSQL.
> 
> > So what if they bought Command Prompt (or someone else like it) and then 
> > cut it off at the knees?    No one ever accused Larry Ellison of being 
> > dumb ... different strategies for different opponents.
> 
> No, Larry isn't dumb. You don't get to be the second richest man in the
> world by being dumb. However he is very strategic and I don't see (at
> this point) a strategic reason to attack PostgreSQL via Oracle.
> 
> PostgreSQL at this point is actually a good value add to the Oracle
> proposition. In 5 years we are probably going to be a immediate direct
> threat but not right now.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Joshua D. Drake
> 
> 
> 
> > 
> > Jeff
> > 
> > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> > TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
> -- 
> Your PostgreSQL solutions company - Command Prompt, Inc. 1.800.492.2240
> PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Programming, 24x7 support
> Managed Services, Shared and Dedicated Hosting
> Co-Authors: plPHP, plPerlNG - http://www.commandprompt.com/
> 

The scenario that no one has mentioned wrt postgresql and oracle is
that oracle can take the source code, branch it or not and support it.
If they branch, it will have less credibility and it will become "interesting".  
But support money from a big name company (Oracle) should be 
forthcoming in either case.

Long term that does not help the support companies, like mine and those
mentioned above.  Or maybe it does because we're smaller and faster.

--elein
--------------------------------------------------------------
elein@varlena.com        Varlena, LLC        www.varlena.com
(510)655-2584(o)                             (510)543-6079(c)

          PostgreSQL Consulting, Support & Training   

PostgreSQL General Bits   http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/
--------------------------------------------------------------
AIM: varlenallc          Yahoo: AElein       Skype: varlenallc
--------------------------------------------------------------
I have always depended on the [QA] of strangers.

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@travelamericas.com> — 2005-10-17T18:28:47Z

Chris Browne wrote:

>tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us (Tom Lane) writes:
>  
>
>>I've been trying to figure out what it is that Oracle gets out of
>>this, assuming that they don't see MySQL as a serious threat to
>>their core business.  The most they can do is force MySQL AB to
>>waste a year or so reimplementing something equivalent to InnoDB;
>>which would hurt them but it's hardly likely to kill them.  But with
>>your scenario Oracle might actually make money out of the deal,
>>which makes it make some sense.
>>    
>>
>
>Well, Jan and I were puzzling over the whole "why MaxDB?" thing, and
>the only way we were able to rationalize MySQL AB's involvement with
>THAT was the theory that MySQL AB wants to become an alternative DB
>backend vendor for SAP R/3.
>
>Oracle is the main player there, and has been for a long time.
>
>The whole thing about SAP AG buying up SAP-DB (which has become MaxDB)
>was that they were "gaming" with Oracle over database licenses.
>Having their own "free" alternative to Oracle represented a useful
>tool when in license negotiations.
>  
>
Interesting thought.  It also explains Oracle's additional market 
pressure against MySQL AB....

>Where MySQL AB seems to fit into this is that they have a "barely
>functional" DBMS engine that nonetheless happens to be nearly
>functional enough to be usable as a backend for SAP R/3.
>
>They were pretty proudly announcing at OSCON 2005 that they had enough
>functionality to support R/3...
>  
>
Was this MaxDB or MySQL?

>If MySQL AB has an *actively maintained* (unlike SAP-DB) database
>engine, that makes them attractive to SAP AG whether as a business
>partner or as a buyout target.  Either could be quite attractive to
>owners and venture capital providers alike.
>
>Of course, if the "ability to support R/3" requires InnoDB stuff, then
>this means Oracle just did a nice job of cutting off this strategy...
>  
>
Even if it doesn't require InnoDB...  Cast a long enough shadow on MySQL 
AB and that active maintenance of MaxDB will be harder to justify.  I.e. 
death by asphyxiation will kill any project or company.   My predictions 
are that Oracle will try to drive up the costs of MySQL and then when 
the company starts to flounder, will buy it for pennies on the dollar.  
If they are actively maintaining MaxDB, well, this just cut the knees 
out from under that.

Also, what Oracle has done is cast enough of a shadow on MySQL to make 
them a very unattractive buyout target.  This is a very interesting move 
by Oracle...  It will be interesting to see where it goes....

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2005-10-17T18:44:24Z

Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> writes:
> tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us (Tom Lane) writes:
>> I've been trying to figure out what it is that Oracle gets out of
>> this, assuming that they don't see MySQL as a serious threat to
>> their core business.

> [ snip ]

> Of course, if the "ability to support R/3" requires InnoDB stuff, then
> this means Oracle just did a nice job of cutting off this strategy...

Ah-hah.  *Now* it's all clear: an alternative to Oracle for SAP would
definitely be a strong threat to Oracle's bottom line.  I think we just
found the real motivation.

(BTW, has anyone looked lately to see how far away Postgres is from
being able to run SAP?)

			regards, tom lane

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@pervasive.com> — 2005-10-17T18:50:25Z

On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 11:20:00AM -0700, elein wrote:
> The scenario that no one has mentioned wrt postgresql and oracle is
> that oracle can take the source code, branch it or not and support it.
> If they branch, it will have less credibility and it will become "interesting".  
> But support money from a big name company (Oracle) should be 
> forthcoming in either case.
> 
> Long term that does not help the support companies, like mine and those
> mentioned above.  Or maybe it does because we're smaller and faster.

I suspect that if Oracle were to actually formally endorse PostgreSQL by
offering support that people would be falling all over themselves to
find out what "this PostgreSQL thing" was all about. It would probably
be a win for everyone already doing work with PostgreSQL; existing
customers probably wouldn't be motivated enough to change support
providers just because it's Oracle, and meanwhile many people would look
to see who else was offering Oracle support.

Of course, Oracle could tank the market by offering support at
un-competitive prices, but I can't think of a reason for them to do that
off the top of my head.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Robert Bernier <robert.bernier5@sympatico.ca> — 2005-10-17T19:22:49Z

On Monday 17 October 2005 14:17, Chris Browne wrote:
> greg@turnstep.com ("Greg Sabino Mullane") writes:
> >> I think Oracle will buy MySQL too eventually
> >
> > No, MySQL AB is a private company and would probably never
> > sell to Oracle.
>
> A significant portion of it belongs to a sizable set of venture
> capital organizations to whom money talks pretty loudly.
>
> A good offer from Oracle ought to be attractive to them...

Hey, don't forget MySQL AB is a European company. This won't fly like it would in the US, the anti-trust laws are stricter.

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2005-10-17T19:31:31Z

"Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby@pervasive.com> writes:
> Of course, Oracle could tank the market by offering support at
> un-competitive prices, but I can't think of a reason for them to do that
> off the top of my head.

They might hope that they could drive the existing support companies out
of business (assuming they didn't get convicted of antitrust violations
first --- which would be an open-and-shut case, but with the Republicans
in office they probably wouldn't get prosecuted :-().  Then they raise
their rates to make lotsa money, or maybe they'd think they could drop
support at that point and the project would die for lack of commercial
support.  (They seem to understand open-source poorly enough that they
might think that would happen.)

I don't see any of this happening though.  As suggested upthread,
the very *last* thing Oracle wants is to raise the visibility and
credibility of Postgres by a couple of orders of magnitude --- which
is exactly what they'd be doing by offering support for it, even if
the support was only temporary.  The effects of getting the word out
would persist long afterwards.

			regards, tom lane

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@travelamericas.com> — 2005-10-17T19:37:43Z

elein wrote:

>
>The scenario that no one has mentioned wrt postgresql and oracle is
>that oracle can take the source code, branch it or not and support it.
>If they branch, it will have less credibility and it will become "interesting".  
>But support money from a big name company (Oracle) should be 
>forthcoming in either case.
>
>Long term that does not help the support companies, like mine and those
>mentioned above.  Or maybe it does because we're smaller and faster.
>  
>
It could work both ways.  I am sure that if that happened, that Oracle 
would be contributing to the PostgreSQL code base in some ways.  
However, this would be somewhat bad for them because they would be 
commoditizing their flagship product, but Oracle is mostly a services 
business and would probably be able to make the transition relatively 
well.  The bigger deal would be for companies like EnterpriseDB.

OTOH, would you rather deal with the likes of Larry Ellison and his 
peons or the likes of you, Josh (both of them), etc?

I think Oracle will start marketing PostgreSQL sometime after IBM jumps 
on ship.  But don't expect either soon.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@pervasive.com> — 2005-10-17T19:45:43Z

On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 03:22:49PM -0400, Robert Bernier wrote:
> On Monday 17 October 2005 14:17, Chris Browne wrote:
> > greg@turnstep.com ("Greg Sabino Mullane") writes:
> > >> I think Oracle will buy MySQL too eventually
> > >
> > > No, MySQL AB is a private company and would probably never
> > > sell to Oracle.
> >
> > A significant portion of it belongs to a sizable set of venture
> > capital organizations to whom money talks pretty loudly.
> >
> > A good offer from Oracle ought to be attractive to them...
> 
> Hey, don't forget MySQL AB is a European company. This won't fly like it would in the US, the anti-trust laws are stricter.

One can always hope... it would allow a friend of mine at a company with
some funding from a MySQL investor to ditch MySQL.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Ned Lilly <ned@nedscape.com> — 2005-10-17T20:32:40Z

Tom Lane wrote:

> (BTW, has anyone looked lately to see how far away Postgres is from
> being able to run SAP?)

It runs OpenMFG just fine ;-)

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Ron Mayer <rm_pg@cheapcomplexdevices.com> — 2005-10-17T20:33:58Z

Tom Lane wrote:
> Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> writes:
>> Of course, if the "ability to support R/3" ...
> Ah-hah.  *Now* it's all clear: an alternative to Oracle for SAP...

Speaking of SAP...

Jeff Nolan, a Venture Capitalists from SAP Ventures
(http://www.sap.com/company/sapventures/contacts/index.epx)
has been following the Oracle/Innobase acquisition, and has some
rumors and speculation around the events.

For one, he's heard $5-$6 million and that MySQL has some guarantees
on their Innobase contract:
    http://sapventures.typepad.com/main/2005/10/how_much_did_or.html

and had some speculation of petty bickering between Benchmark (the
lead VC in MySQL's previous round) and a partner from Oracle (Lane)
at a rival firm:
http://sapventures.typepad.com/main/2005/10/innobase_ray_la.html
Marten Mickos himself responded and denied that rumor, and he
later retracted that speculation.

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> — 2005-10-17T20:53:37Z

tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us (Tom Lane) writes:

> Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> writes:
>> tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us (Tom Lane) writes:
>>> I've been trying to figure out what it is that Oracle gets out of
>>> this, assuming that they don't see MySQL as a serious threat to
>>> their core business.
>
>> [ snip ]
>
>> Of course, if the "ability to support R/3" requires InnoDB stuff, then
>> this means Oracle just did a nice job of cutting off this strategy...
>
> Ah-hah.  *Now* it's all clear: an alternative to Oracle for SAP would
> definitely be a strong threat to Oracle's bottom line.  I think we just
> found the real motivation.
>
> (BTW, has anyone looked lately to see how far away Postgres is from
> being able to run SAP?)

I'd think that the main issue is that of attracting interest from SAP
AG to do a port.

They don't require triggers, RI, stored procedures, nor, if I recall,
views.

Sybase was long NOT supportable due to it not having row locks, but
rather only page locks.  That drove functionality added to Microsoft
SQL Server back in the late '90s.

It's _possible_ that MVCC could cause some heartburn, though since
Oracle and DB2 both have added forms of this, I kind of doubt it.

I don't expect that Postgres is missing anything of importance aside
from there being a "champion" with budgetary discretion for the $8M
task of preparing a port.  R/3 has fairly separate "kernels" for each
DBMS that it supports, and that's not a small thing.  

It's _not_ like in the late '90s where internal developers had
"skunkworks" ports of Oracle/Informix/DB2 to Linux where they were
able to report "Oh, we compiled it one weekend and it found that it
just simply works."  Porting the R/3 kernel to another DBMS would
involve things akin to:
 - Coding an internal layer that knows to talk to libpq
 - Knowing the different ways of handling R/3 weirdities like cluster
   tables (where I'd bet money that DEFINE TYPE would make life easier
   in a PostgreSQL port...)
 - Awareness of the variations in locking semantics and such

The kernel is a real heavyweight, so a port would require quite a lot
of effort.
-- 
(format nil "~S@~S" "cbbrowne" "ntlug.org")
http://cbbrowne.com/info/linuxdistributions.html
"The  test of a  principle  is whether it  applies  even to people you
don't like." -- Henry Spencer

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@travelamericas.com> — 2005-10-17T21:43:27Z

Tom Lane wrote:

>
>
>They might hope that they could drive the existing support companies out
>of business (assuming they didn't get convicted of antitrust violations
>first --- which would be an open-and-shut case, but with the Republicans
>in office they probably wouldn't get prosecuted :-().
>
Sort of off-topic but after actually reading up on notable antitrust 
cases (such as AT&T), I think that the current situation wrt Microsoft 
is exactly how antitrust law works best in our legal system.  And anyone 
who thinks that Microsoft effectively put this behind them has not been 
following Novell v. Microsoft and a myriad of other cases.  Because 
Microsoft has lost their case, certain facts cannot be litigated, 
meaning that it is now open season on suing Microsoft for antitrust 
violations.... (IANAL, but you can ask one about "collateral estoppel" 
which is a really nasty ball of wax for Microsoft at the moment).  The 
current settlement really was forced on the DoJ by the appeals court.  
This is one area where Microsoft would have been better off (and we 
might be worse off) had they been broken up.  For example, AMD faces a 
much harder antitrust case against Intel than Novel does against 
Microsoft for the reason that Intel has settled all previous antitrust 
cases without admitting guilt.  Don't think so?  Why do you think 
Microsoft settled IBM's antitrust claims before the lawsuit was even 
filed (normally people at least go through pretrial motions to see how 
much of the complaint they can get dropped before settling)?  Indeed I 
have personally wondered if Microsoft opened themselves up to more 
lawsuits by recommending that Baystar invest in SCO....

As for Oracle, they don't exactly have a steller reputation.  However, 
they hopefully have enough to sense to avoid antitrust cases they could 
lose.  At least in the past, their prior questionable actions have been 
of generally unfair business practices such as industrial espionage 
(didn't they hire the firm that got the janatorial contract at Microsoft 
to do dumpster-diving for them in 1999 or so).

But the biggest issue for them is that other parties (such as IBM and 
Microsoft) have been making substantial inroads into Oracle's core 
market.  Spend too much in the way of resources attacking us and they 
divert resources from the clear dangers that they have from large 
commercial competitors.

>  Then they raise
>their rates to make lotsa money, or maybe they'd think they could drop
>support at that point and the project would die for lack of commercial
>support.  (They seem to understand open-source poorly enough that they
>might think that would happen.)
>  
>
Who knows?  Maybe they will resort to dumpster-diving to try to discover 
our super-secret-source-code... ;-)

>I don't see any of this happening though.  As suggested upthread,
>the very *last* thing Oracle wants is to raise the visibility and
>credibility of Postgres by a couple of orders of magnitude --- which
>is exactly what they'd be doing by offering support for it, even if
>the support was only temporary.  The effects of getting the word out
>would persist long afterwards.
>  
>
I would suggest that Oracle has not formed a strategy for outcompeting 
us yet, and it may be several years before they take the threat we pose 
seriously enough to really start work on it.  I would suspect that we 
are treated as "one of a crowd of mid-size RDBMS competitors," and have 
not been singled out yet for special treatment (MySQL was singled out in 
2000 at the latest).  Oracle's current strategy seems to be in trying to 
push things like parallel queries, grid computing, etc. as a way of 
providing scalability and room for growth, providing advantages for 
certain scenarios.  They could then use the high-end to subsidize the 
low end, like Sun does with Solaris (though I think that this is a 
losing strategy and Microsoft's inverse strategy of subsidizing the 
high-end with the commodity market is ultimately more effective).

Maybe when Bizgres MPP comes out things will change ;-)

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@travelamericas.com> — 2005-10-17T21:47:21Z

Robert Bernier wrote:

>
>
>Hey, don't forget MySQL AB is a European company. This won't fly like it would in the US, the anti-trust laws are stricter.
>  
>
Why not?  One would be hard to argue that removing MySQL from the market 
place would have any adverse effect on competition.  Are competitors 
then never allowed to merge in the EU?  Besides who would have standing 
to sue? IANAL though and I am an American so I could misunderstand 
something pretty fundamental.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Robert Bernier <robert.bernier5@sympatico.ca> — 2005-10-17T22:09:59Z

On Monday 17 October 2005 17:47, Chris Travers wrote:
> Robert Bernier wrote:
> >Hey, don't forget MySQL AB is a European company. This won't fly like it
> > would in the US, the anti-trust laws are stricter.
>
> Why not?  One would be hard to argue that removing MySQL from the market
> place would have any adverse effect on competition.  Are competitors
> then never allowed to merge in the EU?  Besides who would have standing
> to sue? IANAL though and I am an American so I could misunderstand
> something pretty fundamental.

In canada we have a thing called the competition bureau, a company is not allowed to buy another company if its to reduce competition

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Robert Treat <xzilla@users.sourceforge.net> — 2005-10-18T00:50:27Z

On Monday 17 October 2005 18:09, Robert Bernier wrote:
> On Monday 17 October 2005 17:47, Chris Travers wrote:
> > Robert Bernier wrote:
> > >Hey, don't forget MySQL AB is a European company. This won't fly like it
> > > would in the US, the anti-trust laws are stricter.
> >
> > Why not?  One would be hard to argue that removing MySQL from the market
> > place would have any adverse effect on competition.  Are competitors
> > then never allowed to merge in the EU?  Besides who would have standing
> > to sue? IANAL though and I am an American so I could misunderstand
> > something pretty fundamental.
>
> In canada we have a thing called the competition bureau, a company is not
> allowed to buy another company if its to reduce competition
>

By that definition no company could ever buy any other company even if they 
wanted a mutual merger, so I don't think that is the case.  Oracle buying 
my$ql wouldn't even cause the legislature to blink... if you dont believe me 
just look at the track record of oracle with peoplesoft/sap, a market where 
there really isn't much competition, unlike the db market where there are a 
least a dozen legitimate competitors in the field. More importantly, my$ql 
has said themselves numerous times they "don't compete with oracle" so using 
there own words you can't put oracle on an anti-competitive practice 
(whoops!).

-- 
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Marc G. Fournier <scrappy@postgresql.org> — 2005-10-18T01:43:04Z

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Robert Treat wrote:

> On Monday 17 October 2005 18:09, Robert Bernier wrote:
>> On Monday 17 October 2005 17:47, Chris Travers wrote:
>>> Robert Bernier wrote:
>>>> Hey, don't forget MySQL AB is a European company. This won't fly like it
>>>> would in the US, the anti-trust laws are stricter.
>>>
>>> Why not?  One would be hard to argue that removing MySQL from the market
>>> place would have any adverse effect on competition.  Are competitors
>>> then never allowed to merge in the EU?  Besides who would have standing
>>> to sue? IANAL though and I am an American so I could misunderstand
>>> something pretty fundamental.
>>
>> In canada we have a thing called the competition bureau, a company is not
>> allowed to buy another company if its to reduce competition
>>
>
> By that definition no company could ever buy any other company even if they
> wanted a mutual merger, so I don't think that is the case.

And, actually, that isn't the case (or, at least, there are ways around 
it) ... two of Canada's largest Nickel mines in Sudbury just merged (to 
the chagrin of their respective unions) ... if that isn't reducing 
competition, I'm not sure what is :)

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Robert Bernier <robert.bernier5@sympatico.ca> — 2005-10-18T10:51:01Z

On Monday 17 October 2005 21:43, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> >> In canada we have a thing called the competition bureau, a company is
> >> not allowed to buy another company if its to reduce competition
> >
> > By that definition no company could ever buy any other company even if
> > they wanted a mutual merger, so I don't think that is the case.
>
> And, actually, that isn't the case (or, at least, there are ways around
> it) ... two of Canada's largest Nickel mines in Sudbury just merged (to
> the chagrin of their respective unions) ... if that isn't reducing
> competition, I'm not sure what is :)

True, I could have explained more. A competition board's mandate is by law to examine if two companies together is for the public good. Sure there's big merges going on..... BUT only after they go through the process. Sorry, I thought this was obvious.

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca> — 2005-10-18T15:04:57Z

On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 04:35:23PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> That was my point. FirebirdSQL already provides the SQL language, so 
> what does MySQL offer that FirebirdSQL doesn't?

Why, compatibility with MySQL's dialect of SQL, of course.  Who else
can accept '2005-02-30' as a date?  ;-)

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
The fact that technology doesn't work is no bar to success in the marketplace.
		--Philip Greenspun

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca> — 2005-10-18T15:07:52Z

On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 06:09:59PM -0400, Robert Bernier wrote:

> In canada we have a thing called the competition bureau, a company
> is not allowed to buy another company if its to reduce competition

Yes.  Like Air Canada and Canadian Air. . . oops.  Wait.  

It's a bureaucratic leap, for sure, but if the target company is in
sufficiently bad straits, nobody will stop it.  Being unable to
control your central technology might well qualify.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
I remember when computers were frustrating because they *did* exactly what 
you told them to.  That actually seems sort of quaint now.
		--J.D. Baldwin

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca> — 2005-10-18T15:37:55Z

On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 11:18:19AM -0700, Chris Travers wrote:
> I.e. I see no evidence that Oracle is taking the PostgreSQL threat 
> seriously, and the FUD campaign is more evidence that they don't (there 
> are plenty of areas where Oracle has an edge over PostgreSQL-- the idea 
> that "PostgreSQL doesn't support transactions" can only indicate that 
> this was a cursory and hasty attack and maybe even a wakeup call for 
> them, or maybe they got us mixed up with MySQL w/MyISAM).  The real 
> question is whether after the .org campaign occurred, we are now a 
> higher-profile target that is taken more seriously.  Personally, I would 
> doubt it for reasons mentioned below.

(I'm using this as an example of more than one such comment in this
thread).

The claim in the .org bid response (which can be found at
<http://forum.icann.org/org-eval/gartner-report/msg00000.html>)
starts like this:

	PostgreSQL, like many other open source database products,
	has been in the market for many years with very little
	adoption.  Unlike the open-source operating system market,
	the open-source database market has been unsuccessful due to
	the complexity of customer requirements and sophistication of
	the technology needed.  PostgreSQL is used primarily in the
	embedded system market because it lacks the transactional
	features, high availability, security and manageability of
	any commercial enterprise database.

Note the slide at the beginning of that from "PostgreSQL" to "open
source database products".  That trick is consistent with several
other things I've seen from Oracle, including Ellison, on this topic. 
The idea is to lump everything into the "open source" class, and then
attack the technically weakest member of that class.  It's good
rhetoric, so I don't think anyone should believe, for a second, that
this is some kind of know-nothing answer from Oracle.  It's a good
strategy.

I'll also note that I've spoken to people inside IBM's DB2 division
who have, as part of their job, keeping tabs on PostgreSQL.

This is why I think we should avoid worrying about MySQL: it gives
others an opportunity to lump us into the "open source" pile, and
dismiss the whole thing on the basis of the missing features in
MySQL.  

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
When my information changes, I alter my conclusions.  What do you do sir?
		--attr. John Maynard Keynes

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Jan Wieck <janwieck@yahoo.com> — 2005-10-18T16:02:41Z

On 10/18/2005 11:07 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 06:09:59PM -0400, Robert Bernier wrote:
> 
>> In canada we have a thing called the competition bureau, a company
>> is not allowed to buy another company if its to reduce competition
> 
> Yes.  Like Air Canada and Canadian Air. . . oops.  Wait.  
> 
> It's a bureaucratic leap, for sure, but if the target company is in
> sufficiently bad straits, nobody will stop it.  Being unable to
> control your central technology might well qualify.

There are similar control mechanism in Germany and I guess most other 
countries. The goal of them however is NOT to increase competition as 
much as possible, but rather to avoid any monopol building mergers or 
acquisitions. Oracle swallowing MySQL would create a monopol? Cough!


Jan

-- 
#======================================================================#
# It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than for being right. #
# Let's break this rule - forgive me.                                  #
#================================================== JanWieck@Yahoo.com #

Re: Oracle buys Innobase

Thomas Hallgren <thomas.hallgren@home.se> — 2005-10-18T16:23:17Z

Robert Bernier wrote:
> On Monday 17 October 2005 14:17, Chris Browne wrote:
>> A significant portion of it belongs to a sizable set of venture
>> capital organizations to whom money talks pretty loudly.
>>
>> A good offer from Oracle ought to be attractive to them...
> 
> Hey, don't forget MySQL AB is a European company. This won't fly like it would in the US, the anti-trust laws are stricter.
> 
InnoDB is^h^hwas European ;-)

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@travelamericas.com> — 2005-10-18T20:19:53Z

Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> Note the slide at the beginning of that from "PostgreSQL" to "open
>
>source database products".  That trick is consistent with several
>other things I've seen from Oracle, including Ellison, on this topic. 
>The idea is to lump everything into the "open source" class, and then
>attack the technically weakest member of that class.  It's good
>rhetoric, so I don't think anyone should believe, for a second, that
>this is some kind of know-nothing answer from Oracle.  It's a good
>strategy.
>  
>
Ok. but it is still a lazy approach and indicates that Oracle has not 
singled us out for special treatment.  Again, this was not the case with 
MySQL as of 2000 at the latest.

>I'll also note that I've spoken to people inside IBM's DB2 division
>who have, as part of their job, keeping tabs on PostgreSQL.
>  
>
I am sure of that.  I *do* see evidence that IBM has singled PostgreSQL 
out for special treatment.  Their attacks are much better informed than 
those of Oracle and tend to the specific case study of Sourceforge.  
This is not the "lump all FOSS RDBMS's together" or even "lump all 
mid-range competitors together with lower end RDBMS's and attack them as 
a group" strategy that they seem to be applying here.  That is also part 
of the reason why I predict that IBM will start marketing PostgreSQL 
before Oracle does ;-)  But this may be a few years  off....

This being said....  I see very little evidence that PostgreSQL is 
mostly deployed in the embedded device market.  And while it is true 
that there are a few transactional features (such as savepoints) that 
were missing as of 2002, these were fairly minor and usually limited to 
very complex applications (and reasonable to code around in most but not 
all cases).

>This is why I think we should avoid worrying about MySQL: it gives
>others an opportunity to lump us into the "open source" pile, and
>dismiss the whole thing on the basis of the missing features in
>MySQL.
>

I think it is important to eventually capture the image of PostgreSQL as 
*the* FOSS RDBMS (which MySQL currently still holds among too many 
developers).  But that is the extent of my concern with them.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca> — 2005-10-18T21:09:46Z

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 01:19:53PM -0700, Chris Travers wrote:
> Ok. but it is still a lazy approach and indicates that Oracle has not 
> singled us out for special treatment.  Again, this was not the case with 
> MySQL as of 2000 at the latest.

I may be more paranoid, but that may be because our use of PostgreSQL
was real unpopular in the original Oracle shop where the registry
software was developed (the technical side of Afilias was originally
called Liberty RMS, and was a subsidiary of TUCOWS.  I was hired
originally by them.  Afilias bought Liberty not long after the .info
registry went live, however, and we've always been a better fit here
than we were at TUCOWS).  I do know, however, that Oracle doesn't
publicly talk about PostgreSQL, but they have plenty to say in
private about it to their existing customers.  And it's not nearly as
ill-informed as the public comments suggest.

> I think it is important to eventually capture the image of PostgreSQL as 
> *the* FOSS RDBMS (which MySQL currently still holds among too many 
> developers).  But that is the extent of my concern with them.

Sure.  But if you build a reputation as an industrial-strength system
that happens to be free, you can go after the FOSS area without much
additional effort; whereas if you concentrate first on being free,
you then have the later problem of moving from "free" to "enterprise
grade".

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
Information security isn't a technological problem.  It's an economics
problem.
		--Bruce Schneier

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@metatrontech.com> — 2005-10-18T22:16:23Z

Andrew Sullivan wrote:

>On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 01:19:53PM -0700, Chris Travers wrote:
>  
>
>>Ok. but it is still a lazy approach and indicates that Oracle has not 
>>singled us out for special treatment.  Again, this was not the case with 
>>MySQL as of 2000 at the latest.
>>    
>>
>
>I may be more paranoid, but that may be because our use of PostgreSQL
>was real unpopular in the original Oracle shop where the registry
>software was developed (the technical side of Afilias was originally
>called Liberty RMS, and was a subsidiary of TUCOWS.  I was hired
>originally by them.  Afilias bought Liberty not long after the .info
>registry went live, however, and we've always been a better fit here
>than we were at TUCOWS).  I do know, however, that Oracle doesn't
>publicly talk about PostgreSQL, but they have plenty to say in
>private about it to their existing customers.  And it's not nearly as
>ill-informed as the public comments suggest.
>  
>
Interesting.  So they are willing to appear ill-informed in public but 
better informed in private?  To what end?  That seems strange to me....

>  
>
>>I think it is important to eventually capture the image of PostgreSQL as 
>>*the* FOSS RDBMS (which MySQL currently still holds among too many 
>>developers).  But that is the extent of my concern with them.
>>    
>>
>
>Sure.  But if you build a reputation as an industrial-strength system
>that happens to be free, you can go after the FOSS area without much
>additional effort; whereas if you concentrate first on being free,
>you then have the later problem of moving from "free" to "enterprise
>grade".
>  
>
Well, it cuts both ways.  MySQL's strategy is very Microsoft-like (in an 
effective way) in that it seeks to use the commodity market to subsidize 
the higher end-market and thereby grow its way into the enterprise, sort 
of like Windows....  This really isn't a bad way to go.

However, where we shine is that we have a bigger and more active 
community than MySQL (to the extent that MySQL used to criticize us for 
it).  This is in the end what really matters in the short run.  However, 
failing to capture the low-end market (including uninteresting markets 
like CMS, low-end web apps, etc) has a number of real disadvantages 
including:

1)  Beginners learn bad habits via MySQL and MS Access.
2)  Those beginners may grow to do larger applications and will try to 
use MS Access or MySQL in ways that it is not designed to work (and for 
MS Access users, they will invariably go to MS SQL).

This is one reason why I would like to see some of us push PostgreSQL 
into a role of *the* RDBMS to study for RDBMS theory.  Unfortunately 
this means a lot of documentation written by experts interested in 
really teaching beginners the right way to do things....  I don't 
consider myself qualified to do this by myself.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Robert Treat <xzilla@users.sourceforge.net> — 2005-10-18T23:58:24Z

On Monday 17 October 2005 13:01, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 09:46, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> > > Please don't make this assumption. PostgreSQL is *very* much on their
> > > radar, and probably represents the biggest long-term threat to their
> > > core database business at the moment. We got a hint of that during the
> > > .org bidding, but for now it is in Oracle's interest not to call
> > > attention to PostgreSQL. The last thing they want is publicity for the
> > > project. We may be a harder target to hurt than MySQL, but we are a
> > > target, make no mistake about it. I'm sure PostgreSQL is on the radar
> > > of Sybase, Microsoft, and IBM as well.
> >
> > And they probably read every word we write ;)
>
> I'd bet they read plenty, but don't necessarily understand a lot,
> judging by their pitiful fud campaign when Afilias proposed using
> postgresql as a database behind .org.  They tried to say PostgreSQL
> didn't support transactions.  So, while we may be on their screens, and
> I'm sure some marketeer there tries to keep up with some of the traffic
> here, the actual comprehension seems pretty low judging by their past
> statements.
>
> Actually, I kinda hope it stays that way.
>

Don't bet on it.  If Afilias is 4 years smarter about postgresql, you can bet 
Oracle is too. In fact my guess is that they started reading up as soon 
as .org was awarded to a pg based company.   I think before that they 
probably figured that my$ql, being more popular, was roughly equal if not 
better than postgresql, and often confused the two.  If there smart enough to 
be buying innobase these days, you can bet that by now they have this stuff 
all straightened out. 

-- 
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2005-10-19T02:34:46Z

Robert Treat <xzilla@users.sourceforge.net> writes:
> If there smart enough to 
> be buying innobase these days, you can bet that by now they have this stuff 
> all straightened out. 

No, that doesn't seem to follow ... if Oracle are spending their
resources to attack MySQL rather than us, the conclusion would be that
they are clearly still more informed by "the buzz" than technical merit.

What seems likely to me is that the Innobase purchase was a target
of opportunity --- they saw a chance to destroy a potential threat,
and took it.  This proves nothing about their assessment of the
relative risks from us and MySQL ... only that they haven't yet
thought of an equally painless way to destroy us.

			regards, tom lane

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> — 2005-10-19T02:55:22Z

>>If there smart enough to 
>>be buying innobase these days, you can bet that by now they have this stuff 
>>all straightened out. 
> 
> 
> No, that doesn't seem to follow ... if Oracle are spending their
> resources to attack MySQL rather than us, the conclusion would be that
> they are clearly still more informed by "the buzz" than technical merit.

With no disrespect to PostgreSQL, MySQL has 100x our downloads and 
installations...

Oracle is simply going after by far the biggest open source database 
player...

Chris

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@metatrontech.com> — 2005-10-19T03:44:41Z

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:

> With no disrespect to PostgreSQL, MySQL has 100x our downloads and 
> installations...
>
> Oracle is simply going after by far the biggest open source database 
> player...
>
As I said,  Oracle demonstrated in 2000 that they had already singled 
MySQL out for special competitive treatement.  They did this by starting 
to offer db conversion utilities in order to help people migrate from 
MySQL to Oracle.  It is not about technical merit, it is about market 
share.  We could have the best RDBMS in the world but if we never get 
enough users to directly threaten them to the level that MS SQL Server 
or DB2 does, we are not the threat that they are, and we are not worth 
the time and expense that research, competitive strategizing, etc. would 
incur.  Therefore, I suspect that we are sort of on the back burner 
competitive strategy wise.  I.e. competition is on a project-by-project 
basis, and not coordinated as of yet.

There are some things on the horizon that could change this quite 
quickly, however:

1)  Sun is talking about packaging PostgreSQL and distributing it with 
Solaris.  This would bring us directly head to head with Oracle in a 
large number of potential installations.

2)  EnterpriseDB's efforts and awards may have attracted some 
attention.  This may reinforce the idea that we are a threat.

If this is the case, I bet that Oracle is probably pressuring Sun not to 
distribute PostgreSQL, and if they do anyway, we need to be concerned 
about the beginning of a high-level coordinated strategy targetting us 
specifically.  IMO, it is likely to start with one of two things:

1)  PostgreSQL to Oracle database conversion utilities released by 
Oracle (unlikely given extensible languages in PostgreSQL).
2)  Some sort of FUD campaign on the part of Oracle directed 
specifically at us and not tied to any specific project (fairly likely).

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Robert Treat <xzilla@users.sourceforge.net> — 2005-10-19T04:09:41Z

On Tuesday 18 October 2005 23:44, Chris Travers wrote:
> Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> > With no disrespect to PostgreSQL, MySQL has 100x our downloads and
> > installations...
> >
> > Oracle is simply going after by far the biggest open source database
> > player...
>
> As I said,  Oracle demonstrated in 2000 that they had already singled
> MySQL out for special competitive treatement.  They did this by starting
> to offer db conversion utilities in order to help people migrate from
> MySQL to Oracle.  It is not about technical merit, it is about market
> share.  We could have the best RDBMS in the world but if we never get

wadda ya mean "could"?"  :-) 

> enough users to directly threaten them to the level that MS SQL Server
> or DB2 does, we are not the threat that they are, and we are not worth
> the time and expense that research, competitive strategizing, etc. would
> incur.  Therefore, I suspect that we are sort of on the back burner
> competitive strategy wise.  I.e. competition is on a project-by-project
> basis, and not coordinated as of yet.
>
> There are some things on the horizon that could change this quite
> quickly, however:
>
> 1)  Sun is talking about packaging PostgreSQL and distributing it with
> Solaris.  This would bring us directly head to head with Oracle in a
> large number of potential installations.
>
> 2)  EnterpriseDB's efforts and awards may have attracted some
> attention.  This may reinforce the idea that we are a threat.
>
> If this is the case, I bet that Oracle is probably pressuring Sun not to
> distribute PostgreSQL, and if they do anyway, we need to be concerned
> about the beginning of a high-level coordinated strategy targetting us
> specifically.  IMO, it is likely to start with one of two things:
>
> 1)  PostgreSQL to Oracle database conversion utilities released by
> Oracle (unlikely given extensible languages in PostgreSQL).

they need to "reverse" engineer enterprisedb :-)

> 2)  Some sort of FUD campaign on the part of Oracle directed
> specifically at us and not tied to any specific project (fairly likely).
>

look for pointers to lack of benchmarks, patent issues, and great bridge... 
those seem to be the most common rehash of fud. 

-- 
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2005-10-19T04:09:57Z

Chris Travers <chris@verkiel.metatrontech.com> writes:
> IMO, it is likely to start with one of two things:

> 1)  PostgreSQL to Oracle database conversion utilities released by 
> Oracle (unlikely given extensible languages in PostgreSQL).
> 2)  Some sort of FUD campaign on the part of Oracle directed 
> specifically at us and not tied to any specific project (fairly likely).

Well, #1 would require quite a nontrivial investment of time by Oracle
(I doubt they'd even think about offering ports of any PL other than
plpgsql, and still it'd be a major project).  #2 only requires inventing
some plausible lies.  So you can bet we'll see #2 long before #1.

As Andrew noted, we've already heard plenty of FUD from Oracle.  What
we've not seen is a FUD campaign based on serious study of our
weaknesses --- they've only bothered to muster transparent attacks on
"open source DBs" in general.  My prediction is that the next step will
be FUD that's really designed specifically against Postgres.

			regards, tom lane

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> — 2005-10-19T05:10:18Z

> 1)  PostgreSQL to Oracle database conversion utilities released by 
> Oracle (unlikely given extensible languages in PostgreSQL).

Strangely a pgsql to oracle exporter is a good thing.  It'd be a great 
feature of PostgreSQL.  Imagine how many people would start on 
PostgreSQL if they KNEW that one day they could easily move to Oracle if 
they needed to.  Risk management.

Chris

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> — 2005-10-19T05:11:10Z

> As Andrew noted, we've already heard plenty of FUD from Oracle.  What
> we've not seen is a FUD campaign based on serious study of our
> weaknesses --- they've only bothered to muster transparent attacks on
> "open source DBs" in general.  My prediction is that the next step will
> be FUD that's really designed specifically against Postgres.

I admit I must have missed all this '.org FUD' - is it still around.  I 
really don't know what you guys are referring to.

Chris

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2005-10-19T05:35:25Z

Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> writes:
> Strangely a pgsql to oracle exporter is a good thing.  It'd be a great 
> feature of PostgreSQL.  Imagine how many people would start on 
> PostgreSQL if they KNEW that one day they could easily move to Oracle if 
> they needed to.  Risk management.

Problem is: to offer such a thing with a straight face, we'd have to
confine ourselves to an Oracle-subset version of SQL.  For instance,
lose the ability to distinguish empty-string from NULL.

			regards, tom lane

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Chris Travers <chris@travelamericas.com> — 2005-10-19T05:59:54Z

Tom Lane wrote:

>Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> writes:
>  
>
>>Strangely a pgsql to oracle exporter is a good thing.  It'd be a great 
>>feature of PostgreSQL.  Imagine how many people would start on 
>>PostgreSQL if they KNEW that one day they could easily move to Oracle if 
>>they needed to.  Risk management.
>>    
>>
>
>Problem is: to offer such a thing with a straight face, we'd have to
>confine ourselves to an Oracle-subset version of SQL.  For instance,
>lose the ability to distinguish empty-string from NULL.
>  
>
Funny how many Oracle DBA's don't seem to be aware of this "feature" ....

Funny how many of those that are seem to think that this is perfectly OK 
:-(  On the other hand, it is one weakness of Oracle that has not gotten 
a major airing in public...  It might be worth saving for when the FUD 
starts to fly :-)

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron technology Consulting

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> — 2005-10-19T06:12:29Z

> Problem is: to offer such a thing with a straight face, we'd have to
> confine ourselves to an Oracle-subset version of SQL.  For instance,
> lose the ability to distinguish empty-string from NULL.

I wasn't saying we write it - let Oracle do it :D

Chris

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Martin Marques <martin@bugs.unl.edu.ar> — 2005-10-19T09:38:29Z

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:

>>> If there smart enough to be buying innobase these days, you can bet that 
>>> by now they have this stuff all straightened out. 
>> 
>> 
>> No, that doesn't seem to follow ... if Oracle are spending their
>> resources to attack MySQL rather than us, the conclusion would be that
>> they are clearly still more informed by "the buzz" than technical merit.
>
> With no disrespect to PostgreSQL, MySQL has 100x our downloads and 
> installations...

Yeah, kids playing with toys. You can't imagine how many people I heard 
have MySQL installed in there win98.

The bad thing is they addopt MySQL because they could have it installed 
there. :-(

--
  11:55:01 up 155 days,  1:49,  3 users,  load average: 0.12, 0.72, 0.86
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Lic. Martín Marqués   | select 'mmarques' || '@' || 'unl.edu.ar'
Centro de Telematica  |  DBA, Programador, Administrador
              Universidad Nacional
                   del Litoral
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> — 2005-10-19T10:51:40Z

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 10:55:22AM +0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> With no disrespect to PostgreSQL, MySQL has 100x our downloads and 
> installations...

Just for the hell of it I looked at the popcon stats for debian
installs (see below). It tells me the following:

- Something like half the people who install mysql-server (any version)
never use it. People who install PostgreSQL are (slightly) more likely
to actually use it.

- For mysql, users of the client are approximatly twice the amount that
use the server. For postgres, the client and server count is about the
same. This one is curious, don't know what to make of it.

- when it comes to client libs, a lot of people have them installed
(presumably linked to various apps) but they don't apparently connect
anywhere with them.

Now, this is not exactly a represenative sample and statistical errors
abound, and we're not counting Windows installations but 100x seems
like an exaggeration to me... :)

Have a nice day,

#<name> is the package name;
#<inst> is the number of people who installed this package;
#<vote> is the number of people who use this package regularly;
#<old> is the number of people who installed, but don't use this package
#      regularly;
#<recent> is the number of people who upgraded this package recently;
#<no-files> is the number of people whose entry didn't contain enough
#           information (atime and ctime were 0).
#rank name                            inst  vote   old recent no-files (maintainer)
183   libmysqlclient12                4483  3026   663   421   373 (Christian Hammers)             
266   mysql-client                    2803  2188   216   172   227 (Christian Hammers)             
453   libpq3                          3710  1266  1065   231  1148 (Martin Pitt)                   
478   mysql-server                    2342  1171   529   490   152 (Christian Hammers)             
553   libmysqlclient14                2437   954   145   332  1006 (Christian Hammers)             
583   mysql-client-4.1                1111   886    21   204     0 (Christian Hammers)             
661   postgresql-client               1709   729   372    31   577 (Martin Pitt)                   
662   postgresql                      1286   728   132    14   412 (Martin Pitt)                   
883   mysql-server-4.1                 883   490    84   309     0 (Christian Hammers)             
1202  postgresql-7.4                   468   308    37   123     0 (Martin Pitt)                   
1531  libmysqlclient10                3277   214   518    48  2497 (Steve Langasek)                
2253  postgresql-client-8.0            185   110    16    59     0 (Martin Pitt)                   
2261  postgresql-8.0                   172   109    17    46     0 (Martin Pitt)                   
2332  mysql-client-5.0                 120   102     1    17     0 (Christian Hammers)             
2757  mysql-server-5.0                 113    77     3    33     0 (Christian Hammers)

-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout   <kleptog@svana.org>   http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a
> tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone
> else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Oliver Elphick <olly@lfix.co.uk> — 2005-10-19T11:26:29Z

On Wed, 2005-10-19 at 12:51 +0200, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> Just for the hell of it I looked at the popcon stats for debian
> installs (see below). It tells me the following:
> 
> - Something like half the people who install mysql-server (any version)
> never use it. People who install PostgreSQL are (slightly) more likely
> to actually use it.
> 
> - For mysql, users of the client are approximatly twice the amount that
> use the server. For postgres, the client and server count is about the
> same. This one is curious, don't know what to make of it.

When you install Debian from scratch, the tasksel list offers you the
chance to install database packages.  If you select that, it installs
postgresql server rather than mysql, which may help the statistics in
Debian.  The postgresql server package depends on postgresql-client.  I
think that the only people to install postgresql-client without the
server would be those with multiple machines communicating with a server
and a number of those might install the server by mistake.  The ratio of
nearly 6 to 4 seems quite reasonable.
-- 
Oliver Elphick                                          olly@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight                              http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
GPG: 1024D/A54310EA  92C8 39E7 280E 3631 3F0E  1EC0 5664 7A2F A543 10EA
                 ========================================
   Do you want to know God?   http://www.lfix.co.uk/knowing_god.html

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Terry Fielder <terry@ashtonwoodshomes.com> — 2005-10-19T12:26:58Z

Tom Lane wrote:
> Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> writes:
> 
>>Strangely a pgsql to oracle exporter is a good thing.  It'd be a great 
>>feature of PostgreSQL.  Imagine how many people would start on 
>>PostgreSQL if they KNEW that one day they could easily move to Oracle if 
>>they needed to.  Risk management.
> 
> 
> Problem is: to offer such a thing with a straight face, we'd have to
> confine ourselves to an Oracle-subset version of SQL.  For instance,
> lose the ability to distinguish empty-string from NULL.

Oh please PLEASE *PLEASE* don't bend that way.  Oracle has some SQL non 
compliant flaws at least one is serious:  The inability to distinguish 
between the absence of value and an explicitly empty string is just ONE 
of Oracle's ridiculous fubarness.  People who know what a NULL really is 
and use it properly have to program around Oracle's stupidity to "dumb 
it down" for the weak application developer, let's not do that.

Terry

> 
> 			regards, tom lane
> 
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
> 

-- 
Terry Fielder
terry@greatgulfhomes.com
Associate Director Software Development and Deployment
Great Gulf Homes / Ashton Woods Homes
Fax: (416) 441-9085

Where to concentrate (was: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase)

Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca> — 2005-10-19T13:58:57Z

I think this probably belongs back on -advocacy, so I'm cc:ing there
so we can move it.

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 03:16:23PM -0700, Chris Travers wrote:
> Interesting.  So they are willing to appear ill-informed in public but 
> better informed in private?  To what end?  That seems strange to me....

To the end of dismissing the serious-but-free competition in public. 
If Oracle is talking to the computer press, they have enough
experience to know just how much they can play with stating the way
the world is, and have it quoted verbatim as revealed truth.  Apart
from database weenies like us, people reading the Oracle
pronouncement conflating PostgreSQL and other database systems will
just think it's true.  After all, Oracle said it, and the press guy
from InfoWorld must have checked it out, right?  If you think I'm
being unduly cynical, note that the Gartner comments in their
consulting for ICANN in the .org reassignment basically argued that
PostgreSQL was a significant risk because it wasn't Oracle.  There's
nothing _wrong_ with that way of thinking -- corporations are mostly
about stability, which means following conventional (==safe) wisdom. 
But that mindset is something that Oracle is skilled at exploiting,
and I'm not surprised they do it against PostgreSQL (even if their
behaviour sounds irrational to someone who really knows the
capabilities of the various systems).

But that isn't really why I replied to this :)

> This is one reason why I would like to see some of us push PostgreSQL 
> into a role of *the* RDBMS to study for RDBMS theory.  Unfortunately 
> this means a lot of documentation written by experts interested in 
> really teaching beginners the right way to do things....  I don't 
> consider myself qualified to do this by myself.

I like this idea.  I wonder how to get it moving.

A
-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
"The year's penultimate month" is not in truth a good way of saying
November.
		--H.W. Fowler

Re: Where to concentrate (was: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase)

Robert Bernier <robert.bernier5@sympatico.ca> — 2005-10-19T14:13:25Z

On Wednesday 19 October 2005 09:58, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> > This is one reason why I would like to see some of us push PostgreSQL
> > into a role of *the* RDBMS to study for RDBMS theory.  Unfortunately
> > this means a lot of documentation written by experts interested in
> > really teaching beginners the right way to do things....  I don't
> > consider myself qualified to do this by myself.
>
> I like this idea.  I wonder how to get it moving.

Support those companies that do training, hint hint ;-)

Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase

Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca> — 2005-10-19T14:16:29Z

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 01:11:10PM +0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> I admit I must have missed all this '.org FUD' - is it still around.  I 
> really don't know what you guys are referring to.

I mentioned this in another message, but all the redelegation stuff
is available from ICANN's site.  The Oracle comments were in this
thread:

http://forum.icann.org/org-eval/gartner-report/

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
This work was visionary and imaginative, and goes to show that visionary
and imaginative work need not end up well. 
		--Dennis Ritchie

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

richard_d_levine@raytheon.com — 2005-10-19T15:07:05Z

pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org wrote on 10/19/2005 12:35:25 AM:

> Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> writes:
> > Strangely a pgsql to oracle exporter is a good thing.  It'd be a great
> > feature of PostgreSQL.  Imagine how many people would start on
> > PostgreSQL if they KNEW that one day they could easily move to Oracle
if
> > they needed to.  Risk management.
>
> Problem is: to offer such a thing with a straight face, we'd have to
> confine ourselves to an Oracle-subset version of SQL.  For instance,
> lose the ability to distinguish empty-string from NULL.

Yep.  It is not just limited to empty strings; An all blank string, no
matter the number of characters, is stored as NULL.  And a corollary to
that idiocy is that a string with two blank characters is not equal to a
string with a single blank character in Oracle.  'a  ' is not equal to 'a
'.  'a ' is not equal to 'a'.  Port that to another database.  Seen the
JOIN syntax? *sigh*

Rick

>
>          regards, tom lane
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Marc G. Fournier <scrappy@postgresql.org> — 2005-10-19T16:02:15Z

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com wrote:

>
>
> pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org wrote on 10/19/2005 12:35:25 AM:
>
>> Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> writes:
>>> Strangely a pgsql to oracle exporter is a good thing.  It'd be a great
>>> feature of PostgreSQL.  Imagine how many people would start on
>>> PostgreSQL if they KNEW that one day they could easily move to Oracle
> if
>>> they needed to.  Risk management.
>>
>> Problem is: to offer such a thing with a straight face, we'd have to
>> confine ourselves to an Oracle-subset version of SQL.  For instance,
>> lose the ability to distinguish empty-string from NULL.
>
> Yep.  It is not just limited to empty strings; An all blank string, no
> matter the number of characters, is stored as NULL.  And a corollary to
> that idiocy is that a string with two blank characters is not equal to a
> string with a single blank character in Oracle.  'a  ' is not equal to 'a
> '.  'a ' is not equal to 'a'.  Port that to another database.  Seen the
> JOIN syntax? *sigh*

Wait, I've lost something here, apparently ... but that is the case with 
PostgreSQL as well:

ams=# select ' a' = '  a';
  ?column?
----------
  f
(1 row)

Let me guess ... MySQL treats them as equal??

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

richard_d_levine@raytheon.com — 2005-10-19T17:40:35Z


"Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@postgresql.org> wrote on 10/19/2005 01:02:15
PM:

> On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org wrote on 10/19/2005 12:35:25 AM:
> >
> >> Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> writes:
> >>> Strangely a pgsql to oracle exporter is a good thing.  It'd be a
great
> >>> feature of PostgreSQL.  Imagine how many people would start on
> >>> PostgreSQL if they KNEW that one day they could easily move to Oracle
> > if
> >>> they needed to.  Risk management.
> >>
> >> Problem is: to offer such a thing with a straight face, we'd have to
> >> confine ourselves to an Oracle-subset version of SQL.  For instance,
> >> lose the ability to distinguish empty-string from NULL.
> >
> > Yep.  It is not just limited to empty strings; An all blank string, no
> > matter the number of characters, is stored as NULL.  And a corollary to
> > that idiocy is that a string with two blank characters is not equal to
a
> > string with a single blank character in Oracle.  'a  ' is not equal to
'a
> > '.  'a ' is not equal to 'a'.  Port that to another database.  Seen the
> > JOIN syntax? *sigh*
>
> Wait, I've lost something here, apparently ... but that is the case with
> PostgreSQL as well:
>
> ams=# select ' a' = '  a';
>   ?column?
> ----------
>   f
> (1 row)
>
> Let me guess ... MySQL treats them as equal??

Ouch. I do not know about MySQL.  Anyone else?

I was referring to trailing blanks, but did not explicitly say it, though
showed it in the examples.  I am pretty sure that the SQL standard says
that trailing whitespace is insignificant in string comparison.

Rick

>
> ----
> Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services
(http://www.hub.org)
> Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ:
7615664

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Marc G. Fournier <scrappy@postgresql.org> — 2005-10-19T18:40:44Z

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com wrote:

> I was referring to trailing blanks, but did not explicitly say it, 
> though showed it in the examples.  I am pretty sure that the SQL 
> standard says that trailing whitespace is insignificant in string 
> comparison.

Then we are broken too :)

# select 'a ' = 'a  ';
  ?column?
----------
  f
(1 row)

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Terry Fielder <terry@ashtonwoodshomes.com> — 2005-10-19T19:37:09Z

OK, I am not an expert on the SQL standard, but I thought the definition 
varied by data type e.g. varchar <> bpchar

Terry

Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com wrote:
> 
>> I was referring to trailing blanks, but did not explicitly say it, 
>> though showed it in the examples.  I am pretty sure that the SQL 
>> standard says that trailing whitespace is insignificant in string 
>> comparison.
> 
> 
> Then we are broken too :)
> 
> # select 'a ' = 'a  ';
>  ?column?
> ----------
>  f
> (1 row)
> 
> ----
> Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
> Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664
> 
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives?
> 
>               http://archives.postgresql.org
> 

-- 
Terry Fielder
terry@greatgulfhomes.com
Associate Director Software Development and Deployment
Great Gulf Homes / Ashton Woods Homes
Fax: (416) 441-9085

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Doug Quale <quale1@charter.net> — 2005-10-19T20:10:15Z

"Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@postgresql.org> writes:

> On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com wrote:
>
>> I was referring to trailing blanks, but did not explicitly say it,
>> though showed it in the examples.  I am pretty sure that the SQL
>> standard says that trailing whitespace is insignificant in string
>> comparison.
>
> Then we are broken too :)
>
> # select 'a ' = 'a  ';
>   ?column?
> ----------
>   f
> (1 row)

# select 'a'::char(8) = 'a '::char(8);
 ?column? 
----------
 t
(1 row)

Trailing blanks aren't significant in fixed-length strings, so the
question is whether Postgresql treats comparison of varchars right.

Oracle and PostgreSQL...

Chris Travers <chris@travelamericas.com> — 2005-10-19T21:25:58Z

Andrew Sullivan wrote:

>I think this probably belongs back on -advocacy, so I'm cc:ing there
>so we can move it.
>
>On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 03:16:23PM -0700, Chris Travers wrote:
>  
>
>>Interesting.  So they are willing to appear ill-informed in public but 
>>better informed in private?  To what end?  That seems strange to me....
>>    
>>
>
>To the end of dismissing the serious-but-free competition in public. 
>If Oracle is talking to the computer press, they have enough
>experience to know just how much they can play with stating the way
>the world is, and have it quoted verbatim as revealed truth.  Apart
>from database weenies like us, people reading the Oracle
>pronouncement conflating PostgreSQL and other database systems will
>just think it's true.
>
You mean like that RDBMS comparison on Dev-X by the marketing head of 
Daffodil?  Somehow I don't think that this is limited to Oracle...

>  After all, Oracle said it, and the press guy
>from InfoWorld must have checked it out, right?  If you think I'm
>being unduly cynical, note that the Gartner comments in their
>consulting for ICANN in the .org reassignment basically argued that
>PostgreSQL was a significant risk because it wasn't Oracle.  There's
>  
>
>nothing _wrong_ with that way of thinking -- corporations are mostly
>about stability, which means following conventional (==safe) wisdom. 
>  
>
Sure.  But in this case, Gartner came across as poorly informed.  I 
think that this sort of strategy can only go on so long before people 
assume that Gartner is largely acting as paid shills, and Gartner looses 
a bunch of buisness.  You have to understand how this process likely 
works.  ICANN hires Gartner.  Gartner asks Oracle what they think.  
Oracle directs the question to their PR agents, who then ask if anyone 
has any information.  The PR agents who don't understand the technology 
are then in charge of repackaging the data up to suit Oracle's agenda. 
They probably then do some analysis on this data, maybe ask a few of 
Oracle's customers what they think, and call it a day.  I think that 
this happens because the industry is far to vast for anyone to really 
know all of it well, especially as an industry analyst.  So these firms 
get their data from the big, entrenched companies.  However, I think 
that these firms will suffer huge reputation issues as the industry changes.

>But that mindset is something that Oracle is skilled at exploiting,
>and I'm not surprised they do it against PostgreSQL (even if their
>behaviour sounds irrational to someone who really knows the
>capabilities of the various systems).
>  
>
I am sure that they do.  But they will do the same against any other 
RDBMS.  In other words, if Oracle has formed an internal team to focus 
on "how to beat PostgreSQL" I don't think they have done it very long ago. 

>But that isn't really why I replied to this :)
>
>  
>
>>This is one reason why I would like to see some of us push PostgreSQL 
>>into a role of *the* RDBMS to study for RDBMS theory.  Unfortunately 
>>this means a lot of documentation written by experts interested in 
>>really teaching beginners the right way to do things....  I don't 
>>consider myself qualified to do this by myself.
>>    
>>
>
>I like this idea.  I wonder how to get it moving.
>
>A
>  
>

Two places to concentrate

Chris Travers <chris@metatrontech.com> — 2005-10-19T21:33:19Z

Andrew Sullivan wrote:

>  
>
>>This is one reason why I would like to see some of us push PostgreSQL 
>>into a role of *the* RDBMS to study for RDBMS theory.  Unfortunately 
>>this means a lot of documentation written by experts interested in 
>>really teaching beginners the right way to do things....  I don't 
>>consider myself qualified to do this by myself.
>>    
>>
>
>I like this idea.  I wonder how to get it moving.
>  
>
I think there are two aspects to this puzzle.  The first is to support 
the companies that do training as Robert suggests.

But there is a second one too.  I think that we as a community would do 
well to create documentation about RDBMS fundamentals using PostgreSQL 
as the reference example.  Topics might include:

1)  Relational Theory
2)  Normalization
3)  Database Design (including Date's Central Rule)
4)  Performance considerations (implimentation and 
non-implimentation-specific)

Any others?  Maybe SQL as a language?  However, part of what would be 
required to make this work is that you would need to make the RDBMS as 
standards-compliant as possible, and provide the option for standard 
behavior even if people don't generally like one specific aspect of the 
standard.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

Re: Oracle and PostgreSQL...

Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> — 2005-10-19T21:45:16Z

>>
>> To the end of dismissing the serious-but-free competition in public. 
>> If Oracle is talking to the computer press, they have enough
>> experience to know just how much they can play with stating the way
>> the world is, and have it quoted verbatim as revealed truth.  Apart
>> from database weenies like us, people reading the Oracle
>> pronouncement conflating PostgreSQL and other database systems will
>> just think it's true.
>>
> You mean like that RDBMS comparison on Dev-X by the marketing head of 
> Daffodil?  Somehow I don't think that this is limited to Oracle...


FYI, I have been tasked by Devx to rewrite that comparison.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

-- 
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc. 1.503.667.4564
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support
Managed Services, Shared and Dedicated Hosting
Co-Authors: plPHP, plPerlNG - http://www.commandprompt.com/

'a ' = 'a ' by MySQL(Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase)

Jun Kuwamura <juk@rccm.co.jp> — 2005-10-20T02:07:35Z

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 15:40:44 -0300 (ADT)
"Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@postgresql.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com wrote:
> 
> > I was referring to trailing blanks, but did not explicitly say it, 
> > though showed it in the examples.  I am pretty sure that the SQL 
> > standard says that trailing whitespace is insignificant in string 
> > comparison.
> 
> Then we are broken too :)
> 
> # select 'a ' = 'a  ';
>   ?column?
> ----------
>   f
> (1 row)
> 
> ----

Here MySQL(4.0.20-Max-log) answer.  I'm not familiar with mysql but the
result was your expect.

--
mysql> select ' a' = '  a';
+--------------+
| ' a' = '  a' |
+--------------+
|            0 |
+--------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select ' a' = ' a';
+-------------+
| ' a' = ' a' |
+-------------+
|           1 |
+-------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select 'a ' = 'a   ';
+---------------+
| 'a ' = 'a   ' |
+---------------+
|             1 |
+---------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>
--


==Jun
--
  J.Kuwamura
 rC Cm
   ^
   ~

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Jason Earl <jearl@xmission.com> — 2005-10-20T04:13:32Z

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:

> "Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby@pervasive.com> writes:
>> Of course, Oracle could tank the market by offering support at
>> un-competitive prices, but I can't think of a reason for them to do that
>> off the top of my head.
>
> They might hope that they could drive the existing support companies
> out of business (assuming they didn't get convicted of antitrust
> violations first --- which would be an open-and-shut case, but with
> the Republicans in office they probably wouldn't get prosecuted
> :-().  Then they raise their rates to make lotsa money, or maybe
> they'd think they could drop support at that point and the project
> would die for lack of commercial support.  (They seem to understand
> open-source poorly enough that they might think that would happen.)

It takes a lot more money to keep Oracle running than it does to run
Command Prompt or Red Hat.  If Oracle started offering support for
PostgreSQL at rates that were low enough to be competitive with the
current PostgreSQL support companies they would be cutting their own
throats much faster than they would be cutting yours.  Oracle requires
much higher profit margins to survive than the PostgreSQL community
does.  Every single Oracle customer that shifted to PostgreSQL would
hurt Oracle's bottom line, even if the customer opted for Oracle
support.

> I don't see any of this happening though.  As suggested upthread,
> the very *last* thing Oracle wants is to raise the visibility and
> credibility of Postgres by a couple of orders of magnitude --- which
> is exactly what they'd be doing by offering support for it, even if
> the support was only temporary.  The effects of getting the word out
> would persist long afterwards.
>
> 			regards, tom lane

Exactly.  If Oracle promoted PostgreSQL, even momentarily, lots of
Oracle customers would at least take a look, and many would like what
they saw.  PostgreSQL has suffered quite a bit from being in MySQL's
shadow.  I know lots of savvy database developers that simply assumed
that PostgreSQL must be a nightmare because they took a look at MySQL
(the most popular Free Software database) and were horrified.

Jason

Re: Oracle and PostgreSQL...

Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca> — 2005-10-20T15:22:06Z

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 02:25:58PM -0700, Chris Travers wrote:

> Oracle's customers what they think, and call it a day.  I think that 
> this happens because the industry is far to vast for anyone to really 
> know all of it well, especially as an industry analyst.  So these firms 
> get their data from the big, entrenched companies.  However, I think 
> that these firms will suffer huge reputation issues as the industry changes.

We're going to have to agree to disagree about this; but I don't
think for a second that markets are actually efficient at driving out
nonsense and cant.  If they were, the current stock markets wouldn't
work, and InfoWorld would have gone out of publication ages ago.  The
computer industry has been like this practically forever: in the
past, there was a safe choice (IBM), a moderately safe choice (the 7
Dwarves), and something that would get you fired if it didn't work. 

And consulting companies exist exactly to parrot whatever the current
conventional wisdom is.  Gartner only came across as ill-informed in
that report (or any other I've ever read by them) when I actually
knew something about the technolgies in question.  Do I trust
anything that Gartner says?  No.  But I'm not their market, and never
will be.  Their market is conventional-grade MBAs who have never
studied anything except commerce.  Those people want affirmation of
their prejudices; not truth.  Their prejudices will change over time,
but only if we are successful in moving PostgreSQL from the "get you
fired if it doesn't work" into the "Seven Dwarves" category.  

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
I remember when computers were frustrating because they *did* exactly what 
you told them to.  That actually seems sort of quaint now.
		--J.D. Baldwin

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca> — 2005-10-20T15:28:34Z

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 01:02:15PM -0300, Marc G. Fournier wrote:

> >that idiocy is that a string with two blank characters is not equal to a
> >string with a single blank character in Oracle.  'a  ' is not equal to 'a
> >'.  'a ' is not equal to 'a'.  Port that to another database.  Seen the
> >JOIN syntax? *sigh*
> 
> Wait, I've lost something here, apparently ... but that is the case with 
> PostgreSQL as well:
> 
> ams=# select ' a' = '  a';

Well, you didn't pick the same example, because leading blanks are
significant in the char() datatype:

andrewtest=# SELECT 'a '::char='a'::char;
 ?column? 
----------
 t
(1 ligne)

But is it the case that Oracle doesn't treat that one any differently
from this:

andrewtest=# SELECT 'a'||NULL::char='a'::char;
 ?column? 
----------
 
(1 ligne)

If that's the case, it's pretty odd.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
When my information changes, I alter my conclusions.  What do you do sir?
		--attr. John Maynard Keynes

Re: Oracle and PostgreSQL...

Richard Huxton <dev@archonet.com> — 2005-10-20T16:01:18Z

Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> And consulting companies exist exactly to parrot whatever the current
> conventional wisdom is.  Gartner only came across as ill-informed in
> that report (or any other I've ever read by them) when I actually
> knew something about the technolgies in question.  

Gartner seem to have the same problems as the wider press do with any 
technical field - they don't know what they're talking about. When it is 
reporting on who said what when, both are fine. When it's discussing 
figures, they seem broadly OK. Once you need to get technical they 
generally flounder.

--
   Richard Huxton
   Archonet Ltd

Re: Oracle and PostgreSQL...

Chris Travers <chris@travelamericas.com> — 2005-10-20T20:17:56Z

Richard Huxton wrote:

> Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>
>> And consulting companies exist exactly to parrot whatever the current
>> conventional wisdom is.  Gartner only came across as ill-informed in
>> that report (or any other I've ever read by them) when I actually
>> knew something about the technolgies in question.  
>
>
> Gartner seem to have the same problems as the wider press do with any 
> technical field - they don't know what they're talking about. When it 
> is reporting on who said what when, both are fine. When it's 
> discussing figures, they seem broadly OK. Once you need to get 
> technical they generally flounder. 

This is my point.  Gartner doesn't have a great reputation involving 
product comparisons and areas like TCO, technological advantages, etc.  
They come across much more like semi-techie journalists than quality 
consultants.  When you compare their studies with those of, say, the 
IDC, their methods seem opaque, and their conclusions difficult to 
verify or even outright wrong.  Similarly CapGeminii comes across as 
"the Windows experts" so why would one take their word on something like 
Linux?

The problem I am mentioning is that consulting firms exist to provide 
competent advice.  When they are proven wrong, it becomes a black eye.  
Indeed, they could have made a better case against PostgreSQL by simply 
saying "this is a less-known solution that we have not had prior 
opportunity to study.  This may present risks in terms of finding 
qualified administrators and support staff."  And if one is going to 
parrot conventional wisdom, it makes sense to say so and say why.  Even 
something like "Oracle is the default solution in this area and 
PostgreSQL seems relatively untested.  We see that as a serious business 
risk simply because it seems to be an unknown quantity" would be more 
honest than what came out.

This is a general sickness which exists in many of the larger 
consulting/analysis firms.  I assume that this is different than the 
technical consulting firms such as Accenture, but I have little 
experience in this area.  Though to be fair this is largely a problem 
with hiring firms to do things that they are not able to do.  For 
example, if I want a market forecast or an analysis of the current 
market, it might make sense to hire the IDC, but hiring them to help me 
make a decision between say, Linux and FreeBSD is likely to be very 
uninformative.  Hiring Gartner to do this comparison seems to me sort of 
like using NT4 to manage user accounts in a 20000 user business (this is 
hardly uninformed:  I am an MCSE).

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to> — 2005-10-23T06:02:19Z

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 10:07:05 -0500,
  Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com wrote:
> 
> Yep.  It is not just limited to empty strings; An all blank string, no
> matter the number of characters, is stored as NULL.  And a corollary to
> that idiocy is that a string with two blank characters is not equal to a
> string with a single blank character in Oracle.  'a  ' is not equal to 'a
> '.  'a ' is not equal to 'a'.  Port that to another database.  Seen the
> JOIN syntax? *sigh*

I don't believe this is true.
The following example is from Oracle 9i:

SQL> select 1 from dual where ' ' is null;

no rows selected

SQL> select 1 from dual where '' is null;

         1
----------
         1

Peoplesoft uses ' ' in a lot of fields as sort of a missing value code. My
theory about this is that they want to avoid database specific weirdness
involving nulls and oracles treatment of null strings.