Sun-mySQL or Sun-PostgreSQL?

nospam@example.com (Jonathan Bond-Caron) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 10:32:32 -0500

It's old news by now but I was recently reading "Sun buys mySQL" articles such as this one:

http://devzone.zend.com/article/2979-Did-you-hear-Sun-was-buying-MySQL

I think like lots of PostgreSQL fans, I was first shocked by Sun's move. Sun has been sponsoring PostgreSQL for quite some time now which in my opinion currently stands the best open-source database for the enterprise. So why did they buy mySQL?

Popularity & Marketing
mySQL seems to be the poster boy for web 2.0 and building a database driven website. Historically, the mySQL DB driver has been bundled with PHP natively, so it quickly became the 'M' in the LAMP stack and the open-source database. It has a catchy name and does most of what you would expect from a database. For me, there's no doubt that it makes sense for Sun to buy mySQL and offer better support for the database.

The Itch
The hopes for every postgreSQL fan is that Sun will not favor mySQL over PostgreSQL. In fact, the hope is that Sun can help steer mySQL to a direction closer to postgreSQL, i.e. support more properly the SQL standard and everything a relational database should offer.

For postgreSQL to gain wider adoption, it definetly needs a name change! But then again, maybe the wonders of postgreSQL are best kept as a "secret"?

Jonathan Bond-Caron - Ideas & Experiments - PostgreSQL

Sun-mySQL or Sun-PostgreSQL?