Jasny | Arnold's wor(l)ds

Sun will be bought by Oracle. Will this be the beginning of the end of MySQL?

MySQL has a serious market share. For that oracle has already tried to buy MySQL back in 2006. In an interview responding to the offer in 2006, MySQL chief Marten Mickos told that the reason for declining was that they wanted to keep MySQL an independent product. From that I assume that oracle wanted to merge Oracle DB and MySQL technology. Even though MySQL will be part of a major merger for which the rules aren’t yet clear, you might think that Oracle hasn’t changed their ideas about what they want with MySQL in the last 3 years.

Won’t MySQL just lose most of its market share if it become something else. Other databases like PostgreSQL have been making mayor steps and are in many expects better than MySQL. MySQL has remained to be the only serious open-source RDBMS in respects of market share though. I believe this is mainly because MySQL is known, tried and tested. This might be a fragile thing though.

Based on Oracle’s decision, I might just take a more serious look at PostgreSQL. Changing is usually not so nice, but change often is.

Any thoughts? Leave a comment or trackback.

Associated websites often share user information, so a visitor only has to register once and can use that username and password for all sites. A good example for this is Google. You can use you google account for GMail, Blogger, iGoogle, google code, etc. This is nice, but it would be even nicer if logging in for GMail would mean I’m also logged in for the other websites. For that you need to implement single sign-on (SSO).

There are many single sign-on applications and protocols. Most of these are fairly complex. Applications often come with full user management solutions. This makes them difficult to integrate. Most solutions also don’t work well with AJAX, because redirection is used to let the visitor log in at the SSO server.

I’ve written a simple single sign-on solution (400 lines of code), which works by linking sessions. This solutions works for normal websites as well as AJAX sites.
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