Oracle finally killed MySQL!

About 15 years ago, Oracle acquired Sun Corporation [1], thus also owning MySQL. Discussions on the Internet about when Oracle will “kill MySQL” [2] are rampant.

At that time, various theories were circulating: from completely killing MySQL to reduce competition with Oracle’s proprietary database, to killing the MySQL open source project, leaving only “MySQL Enterprise Edition” as the only choice. The spread of these rumors was good business for MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and other niche competitors, so these rumors spread very widely at that time.

However, in reality, Oracle managed MySQL quite well in the end. The MySQL team was basically retained, with Tomas Ulin, a veteran MySQL driver, at the helm. MySQL also became more stable and secure. Many technical debts were also resolved, and many modern developers wanted features, such as JSON support and support for advanced SQL standard features.

Although there is a “MySQL Enterprise Edition” [3], it actually focuses on enterprise needs that developers don’t care much about, such as pluggable authentication, auditing, firewalls, etc. Although there are also proprietary GUI graphical interfaces, monitoring and backup tools (such as MySQL Enterprise Monitoring), there are also many open source and commercial software competitors, so there has not been a particularly large vendor lock-in effect.

During this time, I often defended Oracle because many people felt that MySQL would be abused just because it is Oracle.