While Oracle provides no official information they are planning on improving MySQL and using as a product to compete with Microsoft SQL Server, it is rather obvious from what little information you can glean from public announcements this is a clear business goal.
Microsoft however are publicly seeking a Senior Product Manager, MySQL Compete in the Marketing department. Your goal is nothing technical, it’s all PR to dispel MySQL as a viable product. I quote “you will equip field and partners to win in competitive engagements against MySQL, and you will influence market perception in favor of Microsoft technologies.” Here is the Full job description for those that want an amusing read.
This information came from an Oracle colleague of mine based in Asia.
Maybe someone over there read all of the PR from Oracle about making MySQL better for Windows.
I’m not sure about official information, but the Oracle MySQL sales reps that were visiting my company a month ago made a big point that Mysql on Windows was Oracle’s SQL Server killer plan.
What is the problem? Aren’t Oracle also trying their best to take market shares from SQL Server as well(or maybe rather to stop SQL Server eating market shares from Oracle as they have been doing for long)?
The real scandal here is that both both Oracle and MySQL have failed to challenge SQL Server as the database used by mid-size enterprises for administrative purposes (payroll, purchasing, finance, project management et. etc.).
Just as SQL Server totally dominates the mid-enterprise market Azure is no worse for the Cloud. What MS does (and the OSS world continuously fail to do) is to provide IT-solutions for non-IT-people. Do not underestimate SQL Server (for Enterprise) nor Azure (for the Cloud). They fit the needs of lots of people and organizations.
I am sorry, but I do not find anything spectacular here. MS tell what they intend to do. And didn’t we all know it already? Why try to hide what every teenager knows?
@Ronald .. maybe you are qualified for the job BTW?
@Aaron: “MySQL on Windows as SQL Server killer” will fail completely as InnoDB is much too complicated for typical Windows users and organizations using Windows. To kill SQL server MySQL/Oracle have moved in the wrong direction for years: adding *more complexity* and not *provided simplicity*.
If I had the skills I would develop ‘ColibriDB’ (small, fast and beautiful – I hereby copyright the name!
) based on the MySQL server with PBXT as the only engine (I proposed this to Paul from Primebase at the MySQL UC almost 3 years ago, but it seems he rather wants to ‘bite spoons’ with Oracle than with Microsoft!), native Windows unicode (utf16 *little endian*) support and *LOTS OF* simplifications (like removing 90% of the options and variables – sql_modes etc.). Drizzle does some of this, but has on the other hand completely hopeless dependencies on non-cross-platform Unix/Linux libraries to ever fit on Windows.
Haha, mission accomplished
look at the quotes, it’s rich
“Open source alternatives such as MySQL are growing in influence and credibility among enterprise users, and driving commoditization in the market.”
this is my favorite:
“Candidate must be proactive and comfortable with ambiguity”
translation: You shouldn’t feel guilty about a little lie now and then?
Peter has a very good point: SQL Server DBAa arw always baffled by the amount of configuration params in MySQL. “It’s all automatically done on SQL Server”, they say.
Indeed, you can’t just give them MySQL 5.5 with all those innodb params (now even more of these) and expect them to be happy with a “simplified” database.
To be honest (umm, not that I’m applying to the job), the amount of configuration params in MySQL is just too large. This doesn’t appeal to Windows users.
Personally,
I think that many people like MS SQL because you get pretty good graphical tools to manage the beast. Perhaps and installer that would let you opt-in installation of workbench and perhaps some third party tools could help.