Abandon Oracle and run MySQL? You still cannot escape the claw of Oracle

BKJIA: Ronald Bradford answered the last question. He is an RDBMS expert and one of the speakers at the upcoming MySQL conference. He has rich experience in MySQL integration. In the following Q & A, he discussed the advantages and disadvantages of migrating from Oracle to MySQL. Tips: not only cost saving), but also the future of the MySQL and MySQL communities.

From Oracle to MySQL

Mac Slocum (MS): What causes migration from Oracle to MySQL? Is cost the main factor?

Ronald Bradford (RB): Oracle licensing fee is an important factor for organizations to consider migration. In addition, integrating open-source LAMP products can also provide you with many features, including project management, defect tracking, wikipedia, blogs, and customer relationship management systems provide better services when all these systems use MySQL to store data.

MS: What are the main problems with migrating data from Oracle to MySQL?

RB: proper education and skill training are the most important part of the migration process, but the budget is often the lowest. The open-source product license fee and subscription fee are usually lower than the Oracle solution, but MySQL is not an Oracle solution after all. Most organizations tend to underestimate the time required to become skilled workers, especially when they need to maintain the existing system.

The second factor is the employee's attitude towards MySQL. For example, I participated in the decision to replace Oracle with MySQL on the top 20 websites, many people, including system architects and senior DBAs, did not agree to do so at the beginning. They sometimes even directly participate in the fight against MySQL.

The third problem is monitoring. MySQL does not have its own monitoring function. It can only be integrated into existing open-source monitoring products. MySQL does not always support the production network operation center system.

For these reasons, slow integration with non-critical systems is a successful integration model, so there is a transitional time for everyone to adapt.

The future of MySQL

MS: What do you think about the future of MySQL after Oracle completes its acquisition of Sun?

RB: Oracle has made a written commitment. In the next three years, it will continue to invest more in MySQL at a rate not lower than Sun's. Oracle has more experience, I hope Oracle will invest more in MySQL.

In the year Sun was acquired, MySQL was almost stuck, and many communities were disappointed with the secretly released MySQL 5.4. I suspect that it would take some time to integrate Oracle resources, processes and programs for integration with the existing MySQL project lifecycle.

MS: Can MySQL developers affiliated with Oracle establish strong contact with users?

RB: the open source culture is more special than the closed business culture. MySQL developers will continue to interact with the community, but I doubt whether they will continue to create, write a blog or participate in offline activities.

Sun has lost a lot of talent during Oracle's acquisition, and any gap between employees and open-source developers will greatly harm the community. On the other hand, it is very difficult for Oracle developers to contribute to MySQL development. For them, this is a completely unfamiliar field.

MS: Will Monty Widenius and others be able to form the MySQL extension and patch age?

RB: in fact, this movement started many years ago. It will be traced back to the period when the MySQL Executive began to pursue commercial interests. I agree that someone mentioned the MySQL version of the trademark as a variant of the MySQL product, in addition to the official MySQL version, there are also some independent products, but such products often lack commercial support and documentation.

MS: Will NoSQL gradually swallow the market of relational databases? Or are they growing together?

RB: MySQL will continue to grow in the database market, and Oracle and other databases, because the market demand for the entire database will continue to grow, so I think all databases will continue to grow steadily, it will not be an independent company.

NoSQL does have its advantages. Any product will expand its advantages at its birth and narrow down its weaknesses. For example, persistent and non-persistent key-value storage, including Memcached, Tokyo Tyrant, Redis, and Cassandra, are suitable for some functional requirements, unstructured data managed by MongoDB or CouchDB will be ideal for other application fields.

Another key field is free text search, such as sphtracing, Lucene, Solr, and other products, which are critical to a successful website or application.

The latest news is that Twitter is migrating to Cassandra because it provides better high availability and scalability solutions, all depending on choosing the right product for the given business needs.

MS: you will give a speech at the MySQL conference on September 14. Do you want participants to participate in your "MySQLCamp for Oracle DBA" speech?

RB: two meetings are a bit deep for Oracle DBAs, but I will share my experience in Oracle, MySQL and other RDBMS products over the past 20 years, they will see how to gradually approach and master MySQL from different skill backgrounds, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of MySQL. I will also share some common error messages and solutions.

If I want to summarize it in one sentence, I would like to say "Don't take it for granted that MySQL is not an Oracle database ".

Source: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/oracle-to-mysql.html