Looking back at the MySQL news from last year
I think it’s occasionally interesting to look back at what people wrote about things while they were happening, especially after big changes (founder and CEO leaving, for example). Here’s a blog post from May of 2008, by Henrik Ingo and Ignacio Torres, about MySQL’s business model. No commentary — just the link.
I find it saddening that MySQL has failed with so many (non-)functional requirements one expects of a “Enterprise” Database despite having the money and resources which are necessary for accomplishing this task. The whole situation is even more disappointing when one looks at the current market penetration of the project and the amount of knowledge (or rather – experience) the current (web) development community has with the database product.
The lack of a clear vision (or at least it was never publicly communicated) to get out of the mess the current codebase is, seems like a mark of death for the project, which is only underlined by the high fragmentation of the codebase which has occurred during the last 2 years. And without deep insight in the organization I can only account this to a complete failure of management, both development- and product management-wise.
But as always – technical convincing solutions hardly ever get to be market leader, but they get a chance to correct history once the succeeding but flailing technology is eventually overtaken by technological and sociological advancements…
Michael Renner
24 Mar 09 at 8:11 pm