Origin and status of MySQL products

The name MySQL, the origin is not very clear. A more influential argument is that the basic guidelines and a large number of libraries and tools have been prefixed with "my" for more than 10 years, and anyway, the daughter of Monty Widenius, one of MySQL's founders, is also called My. Which one of these two is the name of the MySQL is still a secret, including the developers do not know.

The name of the MySQL dolphin logo is called "Sakila", and it is selected by the founder of MySQL AB from a list of many names suggested by the user in the "Dolphin Naming" contest. The winning name is provided by Ambrose Twebaze, an open source software developer from Swaziland, Africa. According to Ambrose, Sakila comes from a Swaziland dialect called SiSwati, and is also the name of a small town in Arusha, Tanzania, near Ambrose's hometown of Uganda.
MySQL, although not very powerful, but because of its open source, widely spread, resulting in a lot of people are aware of this database. Its history is also legendary.

MySQL's history dates back to 1979, when Oracle was a little, and Microsoft's SQL Server shadow didn't. There is a person called Monty Widenius, for a small company called TCX work, and basic design a reporting tool, can be in the 4M frequency and 16KB internal computer running. After a while, the tool was rewritten in C and migrated to the UNIX platform, at which point it was a very low-level report-oriented storage engine. This tool is called Unireg.

However, this small company limited resources, Monty talent is very high, in the face of limited resources of the adverse conditions, he is more able to develop their potential, always trying to write the most efficient code. And thus formed the habit. There are other colleagues with Monty, and few can insist that the code continue to be written 20 years later, while Monty does.
In 1990, TCX's customer was asked to provide SQL support for its API, when someone thought of using a commercial database directly, but Monty that the speed of a commercial database was difficult to satisfy. As a result, he uses the mSQL code directly to integrate it into its own storage engine. But unfortunately, the effect is not very good. So, Monty ambitious, determined to rewrite a SQL support.

In 1996, MySQL 1.0 was released, targeting only a small set of people, equivalent to internal publishing. By the October 96, MySQL 3.11.1 released, hehe, no 2.x version. Initially, only binary versions under Solaris are available. One months later, the Linux version appeared.

For the next two years, MySQL migrated to each platform in turn. When it was released, the license policy adopted was somewhat different: it allowed for free commerce, but it was not possible to bundle MySQL with its own products. If you want to publish together, you have to use a special license, which means it costs money. Of course, business support also needs to spend money. Other, with the user how to use all can. This special license brings some revenue to MySQL, which lays a good foundation for its sustainable development. (Think about how PostgreSQL has been a few years into the trough, and it may be completely free from any restrictions).
MySQL3.22 should be an iconic version that provides basic SQL support.

In 1999-2000, a company was established in Sweden, called Mysqlab, and the company name "AB" is the acronym for Swedish "Aktiebolag" or "AG". It can be translated as "MySQL Limited". In fact, MySQL Inc. and Mysqlgmbh are the names of MySQL AB subsidiaries. They are located in the United States and Germany respectively. Hired several people, working with SLEEPYCAT, to develop the Berkeley DB engine, since BDB supports transactional processing, so MySQL has since started supporting transactions.

In April 2000, MySQL sorted out the old storage engine, named MyISAM. Meanwhile, in 2001, Heikiki Tuuri proposed to MySQL to integrate their storage engine InnoDB, which also supports transactional processing and row-level locks.
Now, sadly, BDB and InnoDB seem to have been acquired by Oracle, and to eliminate rivals, even open source, is unscrupulous. The official combination version of MySQL with InnoDB is 4.0. By the mysql5.0,2003 year December, began to have the view, the stored procedure and so on the east, of course, in the meantime, the bug also quite many.

MySQL was acquired by Sun Company on January 16, 2008. The founder of MySQL Michael "Monty" Widenius also made mariadb to fight MySQL. Things have been going on for years, and now Oracle is still putting a lot of effort into MySQL, and MySQL is getting better. At the same time, however, the development of MySQL's derivative version and NoSQL database technology is accelerating. The topic of discussion in the industry has become the wrong thing to do with MySQL. In this regard, we sorted out the voices from two camps and gave five considerations for continuing to use and discard MySQL.

Square: Continue to use MySQL

1. More investment and innovation on MySQL than ever before

The traditional understanding of the open source community is that Oracle needs MySQL to reduce the threat to their relational database business. If Microsoft is the object of condemnation, then this condemnation is right, but this is Oracle. Its flagship database is obviously much more advanced, and MySQL is best able to get a little bit of its edge.

Since the acquisition, Oracle has expanded the MySQL team and given them a more mature development process. MySQL's development and planning is driven more by Oracle than traditional open source projects are done collaboratively by people scattered on the planet.

During this time, as one developer has said, the company is already making the code more modular. This means short-term work, but with long-term rewards. In MySQL 5.6, they split up an important lock in MySQL server, that is, lock-up (the Lock_open), which will bring in more than one-fold top performance boost.

Moreover, MySQL's primary storage engine is InnoDB, and Oracle acquired InnoDB in 2005. These same Oracle-based INNODB developers are working together for better integration performance and MySQL's Database team with Oracle.

2. mysql product is still stable.

MARIADB and open source advocates complain that the new code does not have test cases in MySQL 5.5, and some Enterprise Edition 5.5 features are closed-source. This is a matter of open source purity, of course, a thing that all users are concerned about.

Moreover, since the release of the new version in February, MySQL5.6 is considered to be a solid, well-performing product with some new features. Oracle spent two years putting this milestone version into the MySQL community to test and get feedback.

MySQL 5.6 from the previous 4 CPU threads to the current CPU thread, the number of concurrent connections is almost twice times higher than before, reflecting the increase in reading speed of 4 times times, in addition to a lot of improvements need to spend a period of time to list.

The Chairman of the DB cluster and replication group Robert Hodges said: "He has no doubts about the vitality of MySQL, he even met a manager who is worried that MySQL will be destroyed by Oracle, now that Oracle is turning MySQL into an enterprise-class database management system."

3. mysql is designed to focus on web development, cloud computing and big data

Oracle is not blind in computing trends, and focuses on projects such as networking, cloud computing and big data. Focused on MySQL and MySQL cluster, the aim is to provide scalable, high-performance, highly available, self-healing and data integrity, configuration, monitoring and resource management, development agility, and security improvements.

To support cloud services, MySQL is greatly enhanced by the new features of Gtids (Global trade identifiers). Gtids enables replication progress tracking and simplicity between master and slave servers, making it easier to recover from failures while providing flexible configuration and continuous management of multiple layers of replication.

For 20,134 months, Oracle announced the release of the MySQL plugin for Hadoop. The plug-in enables replication from MySQL to Hadoop/hive/hdfs events, complementing existing batch-based Apache Sqoop connections.

Nokia is the first company to embrace MySQL in the big Data Environment, which is a centralized, petabyte-level Hadoop cluster, associated with a 100TB-scale Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse, A large number of Oracle and MySQL data nodes and visualization technologies enable Nokia 60000+ users around the world to use large-scale data storage. And mariadb, it seems, can not find anything big data related.

4.MySQL Enterprise Edition

The MySQL Enterprise Edition was launched prior to Oracle's takeover, but Oracle has significantly improved the product. Version 5.6 adds high availability features such as replication, Oracle VM templates, DRBD, Oracle's Solaris cluster, and Windows failover for MySQL. It also introduces new ways to perform policy-based compliance audits for new and existing applications.

There are also enterprise monitors that continuously monitor your database and provide you with best practices to implement. It also provides query analyzers to monitor application performance and Workbench, which provides data modeling, SQL development, server configuration, user management, and integrated management tools.

5. Now there are more MySQL projects than before

Before MySQL AB was acquired, it had 400 employees in 25 countries, of which 70% were working at home. There is always a controversy about whether to work in one place. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said: "She ended the long-distance work in Yahoo's permission to do things need to cooperate, that is, in the same building."

An Oracle MySQL architect said on his blog that Oracle has changed and that the entire team works together, although some are on the redwood coast of giant Towers, California, or elsewhere, but are working on MySQL-specific projects. The entire project team works on the cluster, one of which is responsible for manageability, one optimization team is dedicated to the optimization of the database algorithm, the other team solves replication (critical cloud, big data, etc.), and the whole team makes the project more scalable.

Negative: Give up using MySQL

1. mysql is not as mature as other relational database management systems.

MySQL started not as an RDBMS, but later changed direction to include more features. Over time, some mature RDBMS is thought to be more versatile than MySQL. If you want a feature-rich database, you can try PostgreSQL or closed-source options, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server.

PostgreSQL contributor Selena Deckelmann says Postgres is considered the right choice for new projects that Web developers need to have a relational database. "Using JSON data types and plv8,postgres can be the default choice for NoSQL," she says.

2. mysql is open source ... But it's just some.

Traditionally, MySQL is an open source database, but it's not the way it feels in practice. Under Oracle's umbrella, MySQL now has proprietary, closed-source modules. "MySQL still looks very active, but Oracle is stuck in the development process, refusing to issue test cases for bugs, MySQL security patches are tightly controlled in code, and a large number of open source developers are assigned to the new oasis." Paula Rooney explained in ZDNet: Is it time for Oracle to donate MySQL to Apache?

No other open source options are available except MySQL, No. MARIADB is a branch of MySQL that is still "really open source." Skysql and Monty program Ab (MARIADB) merged at the beginning of this year, stating that "All MARIADB code is released under the GPL,LPGL or BSD protocol, mariadb not as MySQL Enterprise Those closed-source modules in the edition. In fact, all of the closed-source features in the MySQL 5.5 Enterprise edition can be found in the MARIADB open source version. ”

3. mysql performance is less scalable than its competitors

MARIADB's Official Blog provides a detailed comparison test of the latest version of MySQL and mariadb, although the results are close, but mariadb wins.

Selena Deckelmann, contributor to PostgreSQL, said: Heroku Postgres makes it more appealing for several reasons, including scalability. "It can be said that they have shipped the largest database hosting environment, can automatically handle application scaling, support node cold add can be very convenient to try new features," she said, in addition, she added: "They have just announced the support of PLV8, Allows you to run JavaScript in the database and make better use of the JSON data types available in 9.2 and later versions. ”

4. MySQL is owned by Oracle and not by the community

MySQL was not significantly changed by Oracle's takeover, but Oracle still owns it, which makes some developers nervous. "Perhaps, worst of all, it's impossible to develop community workers and work with MySQL developers in Oracle," said Michael Monti, the founder of the noose, MySQL and mariadb.

The noose points out that Oracle does not accept patches or provide a roadmap for the future. "It's no way to talk to the MySQL developers about how to implement or how the current code works," he said. If a database developed by an open source community is important to you, Noose recommends mariadb (nonsense!) because it is built on top of MySQL. And it provides more functionality, speed and stability with fewer security issues.

5. An increasing number of options are available

At the Boston summit in June 2013, Red Hat announced a separate line with MySQL and replaced it with the same boat on the Red Hat Enterprise and mariadb. Fedora has announced that it will switch to the MARIADB branch in Fedora 19. Slackware Linux announced that it would switch MySQL to mariadb in March 2013, and openSUSE made a similar statement in January 2013.

Not only in the Linux camp, April 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that Wikipedia, the world's seventh most popular website, is switching to mariadb. In the statement, the architect of the Wikimedia Foundation site, Asher Feldman, explained that MARIADB's optimization and enhanced Percona function settings were the reason for the switchover. "It is also important that, as a supporter of the Free Culture movement, the Wikimedia Foundation prefers free software projects that do not have licensing and branching codes between the free and Enterprise editions." "We welcome and support the MARIADB Foundation as a non-profit organization, especially in the free, open and MySQL-related communities," he added. Steven J. Vaughan-nichols, a technology journalist, mentioned at the end of 2012 that no matter what you think of Oracle or open source and proprietary software comparisons, whether you're using Linux, Apache, MySQL, php/python/ What combination of Perl (LAMP), MARIADB's excellent performance in the world's busiest web site, will draw your attention step-by-step.

So big data, the tech savvy company knows, is MySQL's loyal user clear? MySQL is no longer the only big fish in the small pond of database solutions, instead, MySQL is facing the Oracle free version of the challenge, true open source descendant mariadb, the increasingly popular PostgreSQL relational database, and the growing NoSQL market, If you haven't replaced MySQL yet, there are plenty of reasons to reconsider.

--excerpt from the Internet

Origin and status of MySQL products