> oic. I am wondering then how this is going to impact On-Rev, > which offers mySQL support? I intended to write a multiuser > application and host it on my On-Rev site, but I am wondering > now if Runrev is going to be forced to charge users an extra > fee to continue to host MySQL if Oracle ever decides to up > the ante, so to speak, or even discontinue mySQL to force > people to adopt Oracle.
I could see development slowing down a bit (though it was already very slow for the community edition of MYSQL), but I expect it will keep going. Oracle has absorbed a number of other databases over the years. > I just don't want to paint myself into a corner by developing > for mySQL on On-Rev, and then having support discontinued > because Oracle kills it. With all due respect, Valentina, > although a great product, especially for large databases, > seems a little pricey to me for small projects like the one I > have in mind, and since mySQL is free for development, I can > use it while I decide if what I am trying to do is something > I can bring to fruition without actually spending any money up front. While you can use MySQL for free, it isn't free for commercial development. On the commercial side, Valentina is very competitive vs MySQL. We get a lot of MySQL users coming our way so we try to make them as welcome as possible. For example, if you look at our PHP API, you can do a lot with a simple search/replace of a prefix for porting your app. The database market is a very mature market - meaning, its been around for long enough that there are really big players in the market (1-3), and a lot of products that, facing the behemoths, offer specific features that attract very specific kinds of customers and understand that its likely they won't kick the biggest out of the market. The FOSS movement hasn't really changed that, because these are very technical products, and a product being free or not free often represents the smallest cost of developing a project. This is one reason why we really don't worry about the likes of SQLite - its freer that MySQL - its public domain. But there are loads of things Valentina can do that it can't do (and being public domain, we've shook any fruit out of that tree that looked shiny and ripe a long time ago). Developers use Valentina for several reasons. We really push the speed message - we get a lot of BI customers who are dumping from other dbs into Valentina to do custom analysis applications. That's a hot market for us. There are other reasons too - features we spend a lot of time on to differentiate it from the competition. Maybe its bad to say so, but when I buy a new product (that isn't purchased for pure hedonism), I usually have asked myself how Im going to make money with it - we try to do that when planning Valentina updates. A lot of our main "point" releases, like 4.3 or soon to be released 4.5, we try to include features that our customers can turn around and make into *their* next feature. If a complex but common sort of query against 200,000 records is 20% faster, that could mean our customers (who are developers) can come out with a new version of their product and say "now 20% faster!". It's the same sort of approach in picking and upgrading your development environment :-) Best regards, Lynn Fredricks President Paradigma Software http://www.paradigmasoft.com Valentina SQL Server: The Ultra-fast, Royalty Free Database Server _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution