April 25th, 2006
Ingres to play possum in mySQL hen house
I know, it’s correct to say Ingres chief architect Bill Maimone will be the fox in mySQL’s henhouse, when he goes to their Santa Clara meeting tomorrow.
But I have always had more trouble with opossums than foxes in raising my chickens, here in the urban jungle of Atlanta, and after listening to Maimone maybe reality is the better analogy. (Besides, possums take one chicken, or enterprise, at a time. Foxes can clear the whole coop in one night)
Maimone has a good pitch. He is dismissive of talk that mySQL is ready for enterprises, and he has all his technical points down. Solid is good for injecting data into a telco database, he said, but little else. Jasper is just "a construct for embedding report engines," not a Business Intelligence solution. The mySQL system itself just doesn’t scale.
"It took three years to get Version 6 of Oracle stable, even after it was released. This is not something you just put together. Ingres has that maturity. For the meat of the enterprise it’s a nice solution."
OK. Sold. Now what will it take to switch me over, and what will it cost?
It’s at this point the fox plays possum. "We have migration partners. We have services that can help. But what’s important is getting our message out. We’re here, we’re alive, we have great technology and we’re going to put effort into keeping this current and bringing it to the marketplace."
And I was so close…maybe ZDNet’s readers can get me the rest of the way there. What does it really cost to switch from mySQL to a true "enterprise class" database?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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