Oracle Finds the Flaw in MySQLs Business Plan

Oh, MySQL. We hardly knew ye.

Here you are, perched on the final release of 5.0. Its expected out within mere days; this, the version destined to get you playing with the database big boys, with transactions and stored procedures and all those enterprise must-haves.

Then all of a sudden, from out of the darkest pits of Mordor, Oracle comes and snatches the golden ring.

Yes, on Friday, the database behemoth gulped down InnoDB, the development company behind what some people consider to be one of the most crucial pieces of technology in the innovative 5.0 database release.

Sure, the InnoDB storage engine is only one of many storage engines that ships with the database.

But from what I hear, if you want to do transactions with MySQL, youve got to have InnoDB.

This is how Jeremy Zawodny, an open-source database expert and MySQL user who works at Yahoo, put it in a recent blog post: "Its the de-facto choice for developers who need high concurrency, row-level locking and transactions in MySQL."

That take was echoed by a former Oracle database marketer: Paola Lubet, now vice president of marketing and business development at Solid Information Technology.

Lubet was with Oracle for seven years and was senior director of database product marketing.

"The recently announced new 5.0 features of MySQL are powered only by InnoDB, [which] now belongs to Oracle," Lubet told me. "As a result, MySQL is left only with its Classic edition that is file-based and doesnt support transactions, triggers or store procedures or any other advanced database features."

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