You do know that Oracle owns MySQL these days, don’t you? Forgive me if I’m insulting your intelligence, but I can’t help pointing out that when the world’s most expensive commercial database company owns the world’s preeminent open source database, something’s gotta give. I think of motivations as if they are arrows, and these two databases are pointed exactly 180 degrees from each other when it comes to their interests.
Especially since MySQL is such a great free database that it takes business from Oracle.
Concern over this issue has been growing among both users and the developer community. Recently Harlow Pinson sent me a link to a fork of the MySQL code, sponsored by some of the original MySQL developers: MariaDB. Is this a better choice than moving to PostgreSQL and learning a new platform? We’ll have to see. In the mean time check out http://mariadb.org/.