Hi Tim,

On Friday, April 1, 2022 at 5:02:00 PM UTC+2 Tim Allen wrote:

> The DB popularity index at db-engines.com has regularly listed the top 
> four as Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL, in that order. 
> I notice some comments in this thread about Microsoft being for-profit... 
> well, what about Oracle? I don't see Oracle on the Support Django page 
> either, yet two of their databases have support in core. MSSQL is the only 
> one of the big-four RDBMS's without support in core Django. That seems to 
> be a pretty big hole in Django's offering.
>

I understand that comparing to existing databases seems like to make an 
argument for MSSQL but it is not that easy. First off, Django was released 
way earlier than Oracle acquired MySQL -- I think it is understandable that 
we do not simply drop support for a database just because Oracle buys it. 
Postgres and MySQL (or now MariaDB) are both easily installable via every 
Linux distribution and have been there since the beginning. Support for 
Oracle itself (iirc) was added because the team at that point in time 
thought it would enable Django to get access to areas where it hadn't 
access before. Oracle itself has (imo) been proven to be quite a burden 
over time and there had been discussion about removing it from core more 
than once.

Truth to be told, if the inclusion request for MSSQL gets serious we will 
have to start a discussion about whether or not we simply nuke all database 
backends (aside from sqlite maybe) from core. I'd be slightly in favor of 
simply setting a policy for core that it should only include backends of 
OSS databases. Why? Because it is way easier to install those on various 
systems than their commercial alternatives (even if there are test licenses 
and possibly free containers around there).
 

> They have put a lot of time and effort into this project, and I think 
> they're well on their way to where they need to be for the long-term goal 
> of being in core Django.


I applaud to that, but I still do not understand why a well maintained 
database backend needs to be inside core? And I am not just talking about 
database backends here, we are saying no to pretty much every library 
inclusion.
 

> A lot of the questions being asked of Microsoft in this thread just don't 
> seem fair to me - we're not asking the same of Oracle, Redis Enterprise 
> Software, or any of the other commercial products that Django has built-in 
> support for. Why Microsoft and not the others?
>

We are asking Oracle but we are also not getting far, and simply kicking it 
out is not something we do easily. As for Redis, as far as I am concerned 
(and to the extend we support it) is open source.

Cheers,
Florian

>

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