• RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    An inferior (in my opinion) direct competitor to MySQL.

    There is no comparison between the two. They don’t even compete in the same market. Oracle is an enterprise level database with features MySQL doesn’t even dream of yet, whether it is security, performance or just reliability alone. The problem with it is that the company is horrible and extorts people who actually have an use case which requires them to use oracle. They’ve built the infrastructure in such a way that one can’t just buy a database and use it by themselves, they need to buy services form the company forever. And there isn’t really a fixed price for those services. Oracle basically charges as much as it thinks the client can afford.

    Sun bought MySQL in 2008. Oracle bought Sun in 2009, but not for MySQL, they just kinda got it as a package deal. The real target was java. There wasn’t any plan to keep developing it and MySQL wasn’t making enough money on its own to be able to fund it’s own growth. There wasn’t some plot from Oracle to kill off MySQL, they simply didn’t bother with it.

    And by the way, there is a non Oracle MySQL alternative called MariaDB.

    • MajorHavoc@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve migrated workloads off of Oracle onto MySQL. They are absolutely competing products.

      We can both name 11 things Oracle can do that MySQL cannot, but it doesn’t change the fact that many organizations chose between those two databases plenty of times before Oracle acquired Sun.

      MariaDB was invested in at additional cost to the open source community after Oracle bought Sun. It’s existence doesn’t absolve Oracle of the path their ownership put MySQL on.