Who Uses MySQL?
You do every day and every time you visit this site or millions of others on the web.
Not that it matters and not that we follow such matters very closely, but until today we have never agreed with any of the European Union’s anti-trust actions against U.S. firms. However, today The Wall Street Journal reports Deal to Buy Sun Meets Opposition From EU.
While U.S. anti-trust authorities approved the merger, the European Commission is concerned about the anti-competitive effect of Oracle’s proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems because Sun owns MySQL database software, which is very popular open-source software and powers many, many dynamic web sites. (We say my-sequel while other pronounce it my-es-que-ell. Whatever.)
Unlike html-based sites, dynamic sites write pages “on-the-fly” by querying MySQL databases. (Actually, there are hybrid sites, too, that create, cached, html versions of the database calls and queries.) In fact, for many dynamic sites, the search engines don’t actually visit pages, and sometimes don’t query the MySQL database; instead robots are directed a copy of an XML version of the site’s content.
If you see the asp extension on an interactive form or page, then you know it is a MS-based active server page. While there are a few other applications, if you see no extension or a php extension, then there is a very high probability that the page or form was generated from data stored in MySQL, and if it is an interactive form, then when you click “submit” the form entries are being sent to a MySQL database.
Anyway, when the acquisition was announced we wondered how it would affect the future availability of MySQL. Oracle claims that it is not an issue, but we also wonder about future improvement and development, too. Oracle and the U.S. Justice Department have concluded that other open source software will take its place.
We’re not as sure because the open-source and free nature of MySQL makes it the database on the web. It’s fast, it’s free, it’s large-scale, and industrial-strength. What’s not to like? (HTML based sites are sooo second millennium, and Flash-based sites are like stereo-typical blond beauties: pretty, but dumb, particularly with respect to search-engine-optimization.)
MySQL is the “M” in LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) servers/web platforms. All four components are open-source and free and state-of-the-art and permit web hosting services to offer shared hosting sites for only a few dollars per month. (LAMP and WAMP and XAMMP and various other bundles can all be downloaded for free and installed on home or company servers, and all work flawlessly.)
We don’t have much experience with expensive, large-scale databases like Oracle, but in our view, these various AMP packages are far superior to their equivalent Microsoft products (and, of course, far cheaper).
All of our web design and information system design work uses MySQL combined with either free or very inexpensive web applications and form generators. The form generators are very sophisticated and permit writing and querying of the MySQL databases. It’s very easy for small and mid-sized firms to leap-frog large, bureaucratic organizations to obtain affordable, customized, and state-of-the-art web-based systems for both internal and external users.
It’s a great time to be alive and to consult on these issues. Along with other open-source software and applications, MySQL is a large part of the beauty of it all.
