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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

#71

Post by takeda »

mdnormy wrote: post #12
zerr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Familiarity? MySQL/MariaDB is pretty much the "standard" database that most programmer started with. At least in university. So there is no point on using PosgreSQL if MariaDB fits the bill for them. Less learning curve, easy to hire for etc

I actually had databases class which used MySQL for exercises and essentially it was like this:

* you can configure triggers for a table, but you can't use them in MySQL unless you make sure the table is InnoDB (this was a while ago before defaults changed)

* MySQL doesn't support aborting INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE from trigger, but you can emulate it by throwing an exception

* a table can have a CHECK constraint, but you can't use it because it is not available in MySQL

Makes one wonder MySQL was picked for that class. I get that it was because it was very popular at the time, but it felt like a toy compared to a functionality that any other database had.

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

#72

Post by projectramo »

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?

I hear you. We should keep these companies in the hands of US tech companies that would never dream of violating our privacy or collaborating with a government entity against our wishes.

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

#73

Post by cwyers »

I don't really understand the MariaDB love around here. If you look at actual production usage, MySQL gets the lion's share, looking at the customers each lists at their website. Oracle has been surprisingly benevolent as stewards of MySQL. That Business Source License that MariaDB put forward for new code at one point[1] looked like something I think would have cost an awful lot of goodwill if anyone else had used it.

1) https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb

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

#74

Post by paraxisi »

jamesblonde wrote: post #41
gaius wrote: post #19

Wow. Monty made a cool billion from Sun. Why does he need external investors now? How can MariaDB possibly have blown through that epic fortune?

He only made 300m. Us other MySQL employees (about 250) shared crumbs for that purchase (VPs excepted). He screwed us, but he never had respect for us - "people are lazy and greedy" ( https://www.pythian.com/blog/mysql-ceo-marten-mickos-intervi... ) . Then he promised he would fix the mistake he made with Maria by being more generous. Ha.

Here's the actual interview less the blogspam http://archive.fortune.com/2006/05/31/magazines/fortune/mysq...

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

#75

Post by jzawodn »

cwyers wrote: post #73

I don't really understand the MariaDB love around here. If you look at actual production usage, MySQL gets the lion's share, looking at the customers each lists at their website. Oracle has been surprisingly benevolent as stewards of MySQL. That Business Source License that MariaDB put forward for new code at one point[1] looked like something I think would have cost an awful lot of goodwill if anyone else had used i…

"surprisingly benevolent" eh? I'm guessing you've not been a paying customer with outstanding bug reports?

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

#76

Post by cwyers »

jzawodn wrote: post #75
cwyers wrote: post #73

I don't really understand the MariaDB love around here. If you look at actual production usage, MySQL gets the lion's share, looking at the customers each lists at their website. Oracle has been surprisingly benevolent as stewards of MySQL. That Business Source License that MariaDB put forward for new code at one point[1] looked like something I think would have cost an awful lot of goodwill if anyone else had used i…

"surprisingly benevolent" eh? I'm guessing you've not been a paying customer with outstanding bug reports?

Given what I expected Oracle to do to MySQL, if being late on fixing bug reports under a support contract is the worst of their sins, then I stand by my statement.

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

#77

Post by KGIII »

gaius wrote: post #19

Wow. Monty made a cool billion from Sun. Why does he need external investors now? How can MariaDB possibly have blown through that epic fortune?

If you make a fortune and then turn around and invest that fortune into a new project, you no longer have your fortune.

Meaning, he's probably limited his investments into the new company.

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

#78

Post by dward »

darkr wrote: post #35
andreasklinger wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Google Cloud SQL supports postgres as well.

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

#79

Post by ppeetteerr »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #42
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?

> Is anyone else feeling this? Yes, but the Western governments are moving in a similar direction. I'd rather Alibaba sponsor MariaDB than not.

How so?

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

#80

Post by lambda »

smaili wrote: post #8
svisser wrote: post #4

For context, Alibaba uses their own fork of MySQL which is AliSQL: https://github.com/alibaba/AliSQL

I'm curious what would be their motivation for investing so much in MariaDB when they already have their own? Hedging bets? Encouraging competition?

Looking at their commit history, it's not a fork in the sense of "we're actively developing our own new features and diverging from upstream", it's a fork in the sense of "we've taken a stable release from upstream, applied some of our own patches, some backported patches, and some patches from other forks."

It's a fork as much as the stable packages that RedHat or Debian ships are "forks" since they have a few patches applied to customize for their environment and fix a few issues that hadn't made it upstream by the time they picked a stable release to base on.

MariaDB is an active, independently developed project. They are probably funding MariaDB because working with upstream developers of an actively developed fork can be more efficient than striking out on their own with another actual fork. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually start using MariaDB, and either rebase their AliSQL patches on top of it or drop AliSQL altogether (much of it just looks like backports of bugs or features).

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