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Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

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Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#31

Post by gilrain »

orf wrote: post #25
jjirsa wrote: post #18

Good move, will be good for the database for sure. I think of this article [0] every time someone says "why not just use ": Rule 1: Developing a good DBMS requires 5-7 years and tens of millions of dollars. That’s if things go extremely well. Rule 2: You aren’t an exception to Rule 1. 0: http://www.dbms2.com/2013/03/18/dbms-development-marklogic-h...

Has Postgres received tens of millions of dollars in funding?

It's received tens of millions of dollars of value in contributions, yes. Probably in large excess of that.

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#32

Post by kalimoxto »

orf wrote: post #25
jjirsa wrote: post #18

Good move, will be good for the database for sure. I think of this article [0] every time someone says "why not just use ": Rule 1: Developing a good DBMS requires 5-7 years and tens of millions of dollars. That’s if things go extremely well. Rule 2: You aren’t an exception to Rule 1. 0: http://www.dbms2.com/2013/03/18/dbms-development-marklogic-h...

Has Postgres received tens of millions of dollars in funding?

Likely. Last year the foundation they're a part of received $25,000 in earmarked donations for Postgres which you can extrapolate over the 30 years it's been around to be a million-ish [1]. They've also received several million dollars in subsidies by starting as an academic project at Berkley in the 80s.

[1]http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/annual-reports/

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#33

Post by AsyncAwait »

orf wrote: post #25
jjirsa wrote: post #18

Good move, will be good for the database for sure. I think of this article [0] every time someone says "why not just use ": Rule 1: Developing a good DBMS requires 5-7 years and tens of millions of dollars. That’s if things go extremely well. Rule 2: You aren’t an exception to Rule 1. 0: http://www.dbms2.com/2013/03/18/dbms-development-marklogic-h...

Has Postgres received tens of millions of dollars in funding?

Not sure that much, but Ingres was a sponsored research project and many people who now work on Postgres are employed by a consultancy.

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#34

Post by Thaxll »

zerr wrote: post #6
autotune wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because they don't use it: http://techstacks.io/alibaba

What's the reason nowadays to use MySQL/MariaDB instead of PostgreSQL?

MySQL is faster. There are people that will argue against it but they probably don't understand how the vacuum works. Also if you only read HN yeah you're bias on Postgres vs MySQL. On the end Postgres is "better" but MySQL is already pretty good, it's not like you're comparing a good product to a bad one, both of them are good.

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#35

Post by darkr »

andreasklinger wrote: post #22
dward wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Alibaba cloud, infrastructure like databases is their business. Take AWS Aurora and GCP Spanner as examples.

But it's also easier to sell a standard DB people already know vs a custom (see (google) Bigtable vs (amazon) Postgres)

Odd comparison, Google has supported MySQL for a long time, as has AWS.

Dynamo might be a slightly closer comparison

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#36

Post by [deleted] »

jpollock wrote: post #28
orf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Postgres received tens of millions of dollars in funding?

If you assume an average 10 person years of development effort over the 20 year history of Postgres, absolutely. 20 years * LoadedLaborCost (USD$150k/personyr) * 10 people =>USD$30m.

[deleted]

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#38

Post by ppeetteerr »

Any time I hear that a Chinese company is investing in a product I use, it's as if the Chinese government is now part owner of it as well. This may be general paranoia, but given the latest crackdown on VPNs and privacy, I don't know that I want a foreign government with a significant stake in Alibaba have access to direct the future of MariaDB. Is anyone else feeling this?

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#39

Post by gnbfrdjng »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #38

Any time I hear that a Chinese company is investing in a product I use, it's as if the Chinese government is now part owner of it as well. This may be general paranoia, but given the latest crackdown on VPNs and privacy, I don't know that I want a foreign government with a significant stake in Alibaba have access to direct the future of MariaDB. Is anyone else feeling this?

What would the concrete concern be in this case? Any backdoor would destroy the company brand and be excised immediately in a fork.

I suspect they’ll treat it like a piece of critical infrastructure; their political concerns would be at the gfw level, and I just don’t see the likelihood of weaponized attacks. Databases are usually locked down for egress and any outgoing attempts would be rapidly detected.

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#40

Post by patrickaljord »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #38

Any time I hear that a Chinese company is investing in a product I use, it's as if the Chinese government is now part owner of it as well. This may be general paranoia, but given the latest crackdown on VPNs and privacy, I don't know that I want a foreign government with a significant stake in Alibaba have access to direct the future of MariaDB. Is anyone else feeling this?

Not everything has to be about politics. Sometimes a big company investing in an open source database it already uses is just trying to improve its own infrastructure, not trying to hack your country.
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