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K1 Buys MariaDB

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Re: K1 Buys MariaDB

#61

Post by arp242 »

re-thc wrote: post #53
miohtama wrote: post #6

It must be tough for the business, as more and more web development has fallen in love with PostgreSQL. While the support business for PostgreSQL exists, I am not sure if they can get similar profit margins / earning multipliers as early 2000 software businesses, even open source ones.

> as more and more web development has fallen in love with PostgreSQL As in the hype train? They used to love mongodb in its broken state. If only most of them actually investigate, compare and evaluate to make this choice.

People have been using PostgreSQL for decades for web stuff. I think the first time I used it was around 2003 or so. The project goes back to 1996 (and even that was based on previous code going back to 1982).

I'm not saying PostgreSQL is perfect or the best choice for everything. That's obviously stupid. But claiming it's a "hype" is not a serious comment.

Re: K1 Buys MariaDB

#62

Post by evanelias »

steve918 wrote: post #38
evanelias wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MariaDB Server is GPL and must always remain GPL, as it's a fork of MySQL which was also GPL. Also the MariaDB Foundation is separate from the commercial/enterprise entity MariaDB plc. This article is about the latter being taken private.

This code base has been sold like 3x now and is still around.

Ehh, not exactly, personally I wouldn't agree that the first half of that statement is correct.

I think it's important to stress that this article (press release, really) is about MariaDB plc being sold. That was the previously-publicly-traded commercial entity which develops MariaDB Enterprise and other paid solutions. But the MariaDB Community Server code base is maintained by the MariaDB Foundation, which is totally separate. (That said, MariaDB plc is the largest outside code contributor to MariaDB Community Server as well; but they're technically not the maintainers of it.)

It's also important to understand that MariaDB and MySQL have diverged in functionality over the years, and MySQL is still actively developed by Oracle, who have consistently put some serious engineering effort into it. Many folks on HN seem to think that MySQL died and MariaDB replaced it, as some sort of successor across a linear history; that's not accurate and in reality MySQL is extremely widely used.

Re: K1 Buys MariaDB

#63

Post by stephenr »

stackskipton wrote: post #37
floating-io wrote: post #8

For those who are using MariaDB in a business context: does this make you more or less likely to choose it for your next project? I don't know anything about K1, so all I have is confusion (and a sudden urge to switch entirely to postgres).

I’d say less. This acquisition screams that some MBA looked at their financials, saw money left on table, likely by not completely screwing over customers, and said, let’s do this! Think Broadcom/VMware on smaller scale. You don’t put yourself in debt and replace the CEO unless you see some value not currently being realized. They might even try license shenanigans but with GPLv2, not sure what they can do.

It's a weird scenario where a bunch of people bemoaned Oracle owning MySQL (hence MariaDB exists), and yet Oracle have maintained and allowed MySQL to see huge improvements, and they include their sql proxy under GPL as well.

As a weird twist of coincidence and irony, MariaDB's sql proxy is BSL only.

I don't think either license is a reason to use/not use the respective DB system (HAproxy exists) but it's always funny to me how the "we must keep it open" group did exactly what they accused Oracle of planning to do.

Re: K1 Buys MariaDB

#64

Post by re-thc »

arp242 wrote: post #61
re-thc wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as more and more web development has fallen in love with PostgreSQL As in the hype train? They used to love mongodb in its broken state. If only most of them actually investigate, compare and evaluate to make this choice.

People have been using PostgreSQL for decades for web stuff. I think the first time I used it was around 2003 or so. The project goes back to 1996 (and even that was based on previous code going back to 1982). I'm not saying PostgreSQL is perfect or the best choice for everything. That's obviously stupid. But claiming it's a "hype" is not a serious comment.

> But claiming it's a "hype" is not a serious comment.

Maybe you're missing the context (it's a chain of replies)? I never said PostgreSQL was bad or that people shouldn't use it.

The original comment I was responding to inferred that "every web developer" was now using PostgreSQL and that part is definitely due to the "hype" - whether social media, youtube or blogs, etc. Well there's also the who's providing a "free" database...

> People have been using PostgreSQL for decades for web stuff.

Sure, but not "every" so much so that it should hurt MySQL / MariaDB at all.

> That's obviously stupid.

That's the point. There are influencers and hypers going around and responding PostgreSQL like an an auto answering machine and then many that just believe it.

Re: K1 Buys MariaDB

#65

Post by kev009 »

walth wrote: post #60
kev009 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to postgres over a decade ago but have occasionally had to interlope into MySQL/MariaDB infrastructure. IMHO it has been a lesser choice for a long time, typically just clinging onto it because of legacy reasons or an over-involved executive but these people are also typically very proud and protective over the thing they know. Realistically if you need the MySQL semantics (eww) and wire protocol TiDB or a ho…

For single instances, this seems very true. For complex multi-member clusters Maria/MySQL are quite far ahead.

Ahead of what? Compatibles completely eclipse MySQL's operation model by any conceivable metric or operational hygiene.

Re: K1 Buys MariaDB

#66

Post by stephenr »

evanelias wrote: post #62
steve918 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This code base has been sold like 3x now and is still around.

Ehh, not exactly, personally I wouldn't agree that the first half of that statement is correct. I think it's important to stress that this article (press release, really) is about MariaDB plc being sold. That was the previously-publicly-traded commercial entity which develops MariaDB Enterprise and other paid solutions. But the MariaDB Community Server code base is maintained by the MariaDB Foundation, which is total…

Also worth noting that Oracle makes their sql proxy (mysql router) available under gpl too.

MariaDB's sql proxy was GPL but went BSL at v2.0 (around 2016 iirc).

Re: K1 Buys MariaDB

#67

Post by danbarbarito »

lfmunoz4 wrote: post #7

What are some reasons to use MariaDB over PostgreSQL?

I know it may seem like a weird reason but I think MySQL Workbench is a MUCH better tool than any other open source interface for interacting with PostgreSQL. I usually use PostgreSQL for other reasons, but MySQL Workbench is the main thing which makes the decision difficult for me.

Re: K1 Buys MariaDB

#69

Post by anonzzzies »

miohtama wrote: post #6

It must be tough for the business, as more and more web development has fallen in love with PostgreSQL. While the support business for PostgreSQL exists, I am not sure if they can get similar profit margins / earning multipliers as early 2000 software businesses, even open source ones.

Developers and on HN sure, but the web runs on LAMP (mostly WP). Also, it is sure possible to optimise your postgres setup, but we had some scaling/sharding niche cases where mysql worked and performed out of the box and postgres was (is) struggling; I am not very interested wasting my life trying to get it to work while mysql just works without any tweaking (for that case: other cases we still pick mysql as it always performs the same or better than postgres for our cases; it doesn't have all the features pg has, but we don't need those (yet)). I have not seen the reverse yet.

Re: K1 Buys MariaDB

#70

Post by jitl »

mjevans wrote: post #41
evanelias wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At scale, there are some workloads where it can be a great choice: * InnoDB (default storage engine in MySQL and MariaDB) uses a clustered index, which can handle an extremely high volume of primary key range scan queries * Ability to handle several thousand connections per second without needing a proxy or pool (the connection model in MySQL and MariaDB is multi-threaded instead of multi-process) * Workloads that le…

Partitioning has been supported for quite a while https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-partitioning.htm... Logical replication... https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/logical-replication.... https://github.com/2ndQuadrant/pglogical?tab=readme-ov-file#... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/dms/latest/sbs/chap-manageddatab... In 'recent years' (in database support terms), PostgreSQL has gained autovacuum support. ht…

The fact that vacuum runs automatically does not stop stuck/slow vacuum and transaction ID wrap-around issues from being a death sentence for a high-write-volume Postgres instance. There are many stories on the internet about this, the Notion one (my employer) is here: https://www.notion.so/blog/sharding-postgres-at-notion
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