Django makes you safe even if MySQL disappear
Oracle announced today aquisition of Sun - “owner” and developer of MySQL database. Surely Oracle will not kill the MySQL instantly. Yet, I doubt that they will put much effort to develop MySQL’s enterprise support or advanced features like sharding or replication. I assume they will keep it in company’s portfolio as “low end” database for websites. Which is not so bad for MySQL itself, as it’s what it has been through most of past years and it’s most common usage even now. Yet, if your needs grow, you will be invited to upgrade to Oracle.
Of course MySQL is open source, have huge community and supporting applications and shops. And huge deployments. Like PHP, it will not disappear. Ever. It may be forked and developed by the community or a new company living from commercial support. The future is more or less positive.
Fortunately we are not left alone. With recent progress in PostgreSQL development, it can compete with both MySQL’s speed and Oracle’s power features (to some extent of course). And it is to receive some significant boost in users group soon. The more users, the more progress and support, you know, the market thingy.
Another question is whether PostgreSQL will cope with sudden migration of ex-MySQL users. Will it be ready with documentation and support to provide easy converting process. Easy-start enough to become mainstream? My controversial reference is, that such a great language as Python needed easy-to-start and incredibly fun-to-use Django, to start converting PHPers. Although many great projects tried before with less success (Zope/Plone, Zope3/Grok, TurboGears, Pylons).
What does make me sit comfortably in my chair and sip my tea with smile? That’s, thanks to Django, most of my applications are not DB-solution dependent (in few I have some bare SQL or DB dependent triggers/functions etc). I develop them on SQLite and they run smoothly on it in the early days. When I need more, PostgreSQL (or MySQL) is just few commands away, all database structure, content migration and application logic. Easy switch. No rewriting. No pain.
Anyway, life keeps surprising and being interesting :)
