Oracle & Open Source

Oracle is in sync with the Open Source community. InnoDB followed by ADF Faces, which was contributed to Apache, by Oracle and others like BPEL Process manger Plug in for Eclipse, to name a few.

A couple of months before, I passed through an article in OTN, Oracle Technology website, regarding the acquisitions of Innobase, the company which makes a very powerful DB engine called InnoDB. To make things clearer, let me just talk about InnoDB for a while.

I am not sure of the version, when MySQL made InnoDB the default engine. But earlier in MySQL versions of 3.x, it was a pain working with MYSQL and the basic MyISAM engine, where there was not foreign key constrains available, and the performance was snail. The INODB, which comes with the MYSQL, has a bunch of excellent features, which made MySQL the best open source database. To name a few, they are:

Transaction-safe

Oracle-styles, non-locking read

Multi-user concurrency

Constraint support-foreign keys

Maximum performance, with large volumes of data

Moreover, fully integrated with MySQL Server, the InnoDB storage engine maintains its own buffer pool for caching data and indexes in main memory. InnoDB stores its tables and indexes in a tablespace, which may consist of several files (or raw disk partitions). This is different from, for example, MyISAM tables where each table is stored using separate files. InnoDB tables can be of any size even on operating systems where file size is limited to 2GB.

J, Not Sure of what will be the fate of MYSQL. But I feel this is one of the intelligent acquisitions Oracle has made. Literally speaking MYSQL, is/was definitely a competitor for Oracle Database, for customers who look for both Economy and a bit of performance. The Oracle policy: “BUY IT IF YOU CANT BEAT IT” is slowly and consistently making waves.

Well, one more thing to add, MYSQL is not free, for people who think that way:

http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/faq.html