Daily Archives: January 17, 2008

internet, microsoft, software, software development, web authoring

Sun gets a database manager, but Oracle owns its InnoDB engine

3 Comments

Sun now has a database manager. It’s been a long time coming. Oracle has … Oracle, IBM has DB2, Microsoft has SQL Server; it’s been obvious for years that Sun had a gap to fill. Now Sun has MySQL.

This is interesting to me as I was a relatively early user of the product. I didn’t much like it. It was missing important features like transactions, stored procedures and triggers. I still used it though because of a few appealing characteristics:

  • It was free
  • It was very fast
  • It was lightweight
  • It was the M in LAMP

I should expand slightly on the last of these. The great thing about MySQL was that you did not need to think about installation, PHP drivers, or anything like that. It all came pretty much by default. If you decided that you could not bear MySQL’s limitations, you could use Postgres instead, but it was more effort and less quick.

The ascent of MySQL is a sort of software development parable. Like PHP, MySQL came about from one person’s desire to fix a problem. That person was Michael “Monty” Widenius. He wanted something a little better than mSQL, a popular small database engine at the time:

We once started off with the intention to use mSQL to connect to our own fast low level (ISAM) tables. However, after some testing we came to the conclusion that mSQL was not fast or flexible enough for our needs. This resulted in a new SQL interface to our database but with almost the same API interface as mSQL. This API was chosen to ease porting of third-party code.

Why did MySQL take off when there were better database engines already out there? It was partly to do with the nature of many LAMP applications in the early days. They were often not mission-critical (mine certainly were not), and they were typically weighted towards reading rather than writing data. If you are building a web site, you want pages served as quickly as possible. MySQL did that, and without consuming too many resources. Many database engines were better, but not many were faster.

MySQL today has grown up in many ways, though transactions are still an issue. To use them you need to use an alternate back-end storage engine, either InnoDB or BDB. BDB is deprecated, and InnoDB is included by default in current releases of MySQL. InnoDB is owned by Oracle, which could prove interesting given how this deal changes the dynamics of Sun’s relationship with Oracle, though both MySQL and InnoDB are open source and published under the GPL. Will Sun try to find an alternative to InnoDB?

While I agree with most commentators that this is a good move for Sun, it’s worth noting that MySQL was not originally designed to meet Enterprise needs, which is where most of the money is.

Update: as Barry Carr comments below, there is a planned replacement for InnoDB called Falcon.

microsoft, open source, software development

How to debug into .NET Framework source code

Shawn Burke has posted the steps needed to step through the .NET Framework source when debugging your application.

Good news for a couple of reasons. The first is the most obvious: if you are getting surprising or perplexing behaviour, you now have a better chance of working out why.

Second, and perhaps more important, this makes it easier to submit bug reports or feature requests to Microsoft along the lines of “why does your code do this when it could or should do that“?

All going well, this should improve quality. For example, the .NET Framework library code is huge, and I’ve heard it muttered that there is considerable duplication within it. Separate teams working on different parts of the library may solve the same problem with different code, causing bloat and possibly inconsistency. Opening up the library to public scrutiny makes it more likely that issues like this will get fixed.

Daniel Moth has a screencast.