Oracle buyout of Sun and it's affects on mySQL

[Lynn Fredricks]

> oic. I am wondering then how this is going to impact On-Rev, 
> which offers mySQL support? I intended to write a multiuser 
> application and host it on my On-Rev site, but I am wondering 
> now if Runrev is going to be forced to charge users an extra 
> fee to continue to host MySQL if Oracle ever decides to up 
> the ante, so to speak, or even discontinue mySQL to force 
> people to adopt Oracle. 

I could see development slowing down a bit (though it was already very slow
for the community edition of MYSQL), but I expect it will keep going. Oracle
has absorbed a number of other databases over the years.
 
> I just don't want to paint myself into a corner by developing 
> for mySQL on On-Rev, and then having support discontinued 
> because Oracle kills it. With all due respect, Valentina, 
> although a great product, especially for large databases, 
> seems a little pricey to me for small projects like the one I 
> have in mind, and since mySQL is free for development, I can 
> use it while I decide if what I am trying to do is something 
> I can bring to fruition without actually spending any money up front.

While you can use MySQL for free, it isn't free for commercial development.
On the commercial side, Valentina is very competitive vs MySQL. We get a lot
of MySQL users coming our way so we try to make them as welcome as possible.
For example, if you look at our PHP API, you can do a lot with a simple
search/replace of a prefix for porting your app.

The database market is a very mature market - meaning, its been around for
long enough that there are really big players in the market (1-3), and a lot
of products that, facing the behemoths, offer specific features that attract
very specific kinds of customers and understand that its likely they won't
kick the biggest out of the market. The FOSS movement hasn't really changed
that, because these are very technical products, and a product being free or
not free often represents the smallest cost of developing a project.

This is one reason why we really don't worry about the likes of SQLite - its
freer that MySQL - its public domain. But there are loads of things
Valentina can do that it can't do (and being public domain, we've shook any
fruit out of that tree that looked shiny and ripe a long time ago).

Developers use Valentina for several reasons. We really push the speed
message - we get a lot of BI customers who are dumping from other dbs into
Valentina to do custom analysis applications. That's a hot market for us.
There are other reasons too - features we spend a lot of time on to
differentiate it from the competition.

Maybe its bad to say so, but when I buy a new product (that isn't purchased
for pure hedonism), I usually have asked myself how Im going to make money
with it - we try to do that when planning Valentina updates. A lot of our
main "point" releases, like 4.3 or soon to be released 4.5, we try to
include features that our customers can turn around and make into *their*
next feature. If a complex but common sort of query against 200,000 records
is 20% faster, that could mean our customers (who are developers) can come
out with a new version of their product and say "now 20% faster!". It's the
same sort of approach in picking and upgrading your development environment
:-)

Best regards,

Lynn Fredricks
President
Paradigma Software
http://www.paradigmasoft.com

Valentina SQL Server: The Ultra-fast, Royalty Free Database Server