CNET cheerleaders go apeshit for MySQL

This time they're citing a survey by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) and claiming that our users "go ga-ga for open source, including MySQL." Which I guess stands to reason if you only read the first two paragraphs of the survey and then ignore everything else. Like the part where people say that they would never use MySQL for anything other than testing because it's insecure, unsupported, and "typically not used for mission-critical applications."

Tell you what, CNET. Why don't you start using MySQL on your production webservers and stop repeating verbatim what you hear from MySQL's Vice President of Products? Then maybe you'll sound less like an infomercial and more like an actual news source. Maybe.

Henning Kagermann has his ass handed to him

Today's articles were so negative that it really pained me to read them. And that's saying a lot coming from me. This article from MarketWatch says that SAP just destroyed its relationship with Microsoft. And this article from Forbes says that we're smiling over here at Oracle. Believe me, we are smiling. But put yourself in Kagermann's shoes for a minute. You're sitting there watching Oracle buy all of these companies and get further and further ahead. We're literally leapfrogging over your pathetic products. You look at SAP's numbers and then you look at Oracle's numbers and then you get all panicked and shit. Beads of sweat pop out on your forehead. You know you have to do something. But what? Your old tricks don't work anymore. The engineers are working as fast as they can and your R&D department is light years behind the competition. So you think, okay, if you can't beat them you'll join them. You'll take Oracle's consolidation strategy and apply it to SAP.

And that's the heart of the problem. Our consolidation strategy isn't going to work for SAP. They're just not that kind of company. And anyway, they're too late. They purchased a company that was being shopped around and they overpaid by a couple billion. Now Microsoft is going to turn against them. And guess who's going to benefit from that? We will, of course, but also MySQL and to a lesser extent Red Hat. After us, MySQL AB probably has the most to gain, because SAP will probably develop closer ties with them after they fall out of grace with Microsoft. Changes are coming, bros.

MySQL AB to hold nerd auction

Inspired by the recent nerd auction held by the Linux Users Group at Washington State University, MySQL AB’s Marten Mickos has decided to hold an auction of his own. Zack Urlocker, Executive VP of Products, says that the auction will raise much-needed money for the open source company and boost programmer productivity. "Nerds need love, too," said a visibly emotional Urlocker. "When we saw the news about the guys at that LUG, we knew they had struck nerd payola. But we believe we’re better than those doofuses. They need haircuts and TLC. We already have haircuts. And we really think the girls are going to go gaga for our geeks. The girls can run queries on us. We now know how to replicate. And we can perform the all-powerful mysqldump." Urlocker said that MySQL AB has started circulating a photo (right) of MySQL employees with their shirts off and will be calling the auction MyNERD. Due to the complexity of the auction, next month’s event will be conducted on eBay with Oracle 11g databases.

Marten Mickos wins third place in China Technology Innovation Competition

More big news to report from China today. Marten Mickos, MySQL AB's fearless leader, announced that MySQL took third place in some Chinese technology competition. Not for winning on any technological basis, of course. Everybody knows that MySQL isn't superior to any other database out there. They won on the basis of their hiring practices. See here. According to Zack Urlocker, Executive VP of Products, MySQL AB "may not have all the perks offered by big companies, but at the end of the day, developers know they are working on something important and they can do it from their home rather than relocating to Silicon Valley." Um, yeah. Not quite sure what to say to that, except that if it made sense to the people in China, it'll probably make sense to somebody somewhere here in the States. We have a lot of turds here who want to work from home. Just look at Bill Gates.

MySQL AB is the new Valleywag

Only two months after Valleywag lost the race to find Fake Steve Jobs, lost ninety-eight percent of its returning visitors, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, who steps into the blazed path but a two-bit company called MySQL AB. That's right, people. Marten Mickos is trying to find Fake Larry, and he's holding a poll this week to help discover my true identity. See here. So head on over and cast your vote. Just remember that your vote might not count. Because MySQL AB uses MySQL databases, and MySQL databases sometimes lose data, they might, well, inadvertently lose your vote. But what the hell, right?

Marten Mickos: "We are now only 15 years behind Oracle"

The world's best database for third world developing countries is about to get a heck of a lot better. See here. According to Zack Urlocker, Executive VP of Products, MySQL will soon let you "monitor dozens of replicated systems," a feature Oracle has had since version 7. But you know what? I'm happy for these guys. Nobody should be forced to live in the stone ages forever, right? So here's to you and your rabid followers, Mickos. Welcome to 1992.

Forget LAMP already -- say hello to LAOP

For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past ten years, LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It's a kind of so-so open source server stack for people who think they can't afford to buy anything. Turds working at places like Red Hat slap all of those free pieces of software together and hand you something that costs, what, about $50,000 a year to support? Call it the hidden cost of open source.

Anyway. So we took a look at the entire LAMP thing and thought, wow, this is an awesome fixer-uper. Like a house that has a leaky roof and a bathtub that backs up, we took LAMP and made it our own. First order of business? Take out the weakest link, which is MySQL, and swap in Oracle. Boom. Say hello to LAOP. Think Oracle is a strange bedfellow? Think again. Check out this article where the author raves about how Oracle was built for Linux, and Linux was built for Oracle. And best part is that the author shows how we're sticking it to Red Hat with our new Oracle distribution of Linux. Sadly, there's no mention of the fact that LAOP costs a fraction of what LAMP costs to support.

And yes, I know that there are hundreds of acronyms floating around out there. Some open source turds seem to think that we should be using the acronym POLA instead of LAOP. To which I say: They would think that. POLA sounds like a friggin STD, not a kick-ass server stack.

What we're doing with InnoDB

So most you probably know that I own InnoDB, the leading transactional storage engine for MySQL. Its kind of been one of those riding-the-fence companies -- it doesn't really have balls, and it could go either way. But the numbers came in a couple weeks ago, and let me tell you -- InnoDB is kicking ass and killing the competition. Who knew? Unfortunately, it really hadn't done much else except sit there like a lame duck. We just couldn't figure out how to make money off it. Oh sure, MySQL AB pays us a little to continue development, and we sell some of those commercial licenses, but that was about it. And it wasn't enough -- not nearly enough.

The question was this: What the hell are we going to do with InnoDB? How do we make money with it, and how can we use it to destroy MySQL?

So we had an Oracle powwow a couple weeks ago to brainstorm. Safra sent out the memo to our best and brightest, and everybody brought their portable white boards and yoga mats. I told them what we were doing, and I asked them to sit on the floor for a while and doodle imaginary creatures and whatnot until they had their big epiphany. You know. We were talking about the great vision that would restore balance and harmony to InnoDB. So they did that, and let me tell you, these people came up with some amazing ideas. One dude suggested that we configure InnoDB to drop all of MySQL's tables at random. That was the idea I voted for. Another guy said that we should pre-load InnoDB with porn that would pop-up on everybody's web application.

But the winning idea was ingenious. Just amazing. Basically, it said that we need to start benchmarking InnoDB to perform exactly 5% slower than our 11g release. And when our salesmen really need to bring home the bacon, they can type in a secret MySQL command to make InnoDB perform 15% slower than 11g.

We've already implemented this. As in, the new InnoDB version with this feature is shipping right now. It's a win-win for us, because let's face it -- who's going to want a slow-ass database like this? Nobody, that's who. Everybody's going to come to us. They have nowhere else to go.

You should have seen this customer who was here this morning. One of my guys was trying to close a deal, and he set up MySQL to run really slow. I mean, really slow. The thing was just dragging ass. And the customer was like, oh wow. Gee. I had no idea MySQL blew goats like this. He really said that, and he sat there scratching his head for like five minutes. No joke. I was just sitting there trying not to laugh. Because Mickos is truly fucked now. Seriously.

Mickos is hard at work again

Now the turd is trying to kidnap and brainwash our certified Oracle database administrators. See here. Apparently, several unfortunate souls have already been reprogramed by the evil open source empire. We know this, because like war-torn Vietnam vets, they've emerged from captivity proclaiming their love and affection and devotion to MySQL. But don't worry, friends. Help is on the way. Oracle never leaves a soldier or customer behind, so just sit tight and wait for us to find you. When we get there, we'll give you a hot cup of Starbucks fair-trade coffee and some gentle, soothing deprogramming treatment. Seriously, it's so good you won't even know you were brainwashed by the MySQL flakes in the first place.

We're also taking a proactive approach. We've emailed our Oracle DBA mailing lists and we're warning people against communicating with anybody from MySQL AB. For those who feel like they're being targeted or on the verge of being kidnapped, we've set up the Oracle Witness Protection Program (OWPP). Just call our tollfree hotline and we'll relocate you and your family and provide all of you with new identities.

I'd like to thank Duncan Davidson for the picture of Marten Mickos (above) that I probably shouldn't be using. Whoops.

Our open source strategy

People love to say that Oracle is the big bad wolf of software development. They go on and on about how we blow everybody's house down and then sell software that's completely locked. In fact, burned-out open source hippies like John "Maddog" Hall even say we're like a used car dealership that sells vehicles with the hoods welded shut, and then we go and charge exorbitant fees for things like oil changes and tunes ups and taking sawdust out of the engine.

Yeah, right. Listen, if you actually believe that crock of shit, I have some land in Florida I'd like to sell you. Because nothing could be further from the truth. Oracle loves open source. Seriously. It all has to do with something I call subsidized software development. Goes like this. You find some sixth and seventh graders who know Python and C and you get them really pumped up about open source software development. You know. Feed them a line about how open source is all about the future and punk music and skateboarding and nerds and really, really, really hot women who go gaga for geeks. Then you send them on over to SourceForge and have them pick a project to work on. Preferably something we can actually use, like Tomcat. Then you unleash the little turd droppers. Send 'em a couple free O'Reilly books and a case of Mountain Dew and a short pamphlet that talks about the importance of dropping out of school.

Boom. There's your makeshift R&D team.

Then, you take all of the source code and send it to your lawyers. You tell them to sort out the licensing mess and turn it into something you can actually use. Then you pop it up on your website as a free download and tell people it's unsupported and crippled, etc. until they purchase the service package. And the service package is $500,000 per year per socket. Or whatever. Jack the price up as much as you want.

Novell and Red Hat and MySQL think we won't do it. To which Larry says, think again, buttheads. You stole our pricing model. Now we're taking your support and distribution model and perfecting it. Just wait and see.

MySQL collection cart coming to a cubical near you

The first thing we tell new hires is that they shouldn't install or use MySQL under any circumstances. But accidents happen. And we understand that. Sometimes people are duped into doing stupid things like installing malicious and useless applications that are harmful to themselves and others. That's why this dude is biking around the Oracle offices right now and collecting machines that have been infected with MySQL. We're granting employees amnesty today and today only. Give us your computers, people. We'll purge the evil and put you back on the straight and narrow. Because after today, Safra gets to deal with you. And believe me, you really don't want to see her when she's got a whip in her hands.

But MySQL is a four letter word

So, a bunch of people are writing in and complaining about how I use MySQL like it's a four letter word or something. Apparently they think the open source database is really great and cool and awesome because companies like YouTube, Flickr, Yahoo, and Facebook use it. And it must be great if Facebook uses it, right? Because Facebook is, like, so cutting edge here in the Valley. They have that new "developer platform" that allows people to create "applications" that let you virtually bitch-slap people and somehow enable your dog to log into your account and update it. Or something. And they don't think I should have called Marten Mickos a butthead.

Okay. You people are right about me calling Marten a butthead. I made a mistake, and I apologize for that. In fact, I should have used a much stronger derogatory term, but I didn't, because children under the age of 13 read my blog and I want to be the bigger man. Marten loves to rag on me in interviews like this. Well, guess what, Mickos? I'm not stooping to your level.

And for those of you who think that MySQL is a great database, I have only the cold knife of pity. Using MySQL is like trying to do Calculus with a third-grade math book. When you're doing real work, you need real software -- software like Oracle. Of course, we don't give it to just anybody. That would be like giving a Calculus textbook to a third-grade student. Grow up, and then come to us. Everybody does in the end, even the MySQL puritans.

Step into my office, Mickos

I always knew the database for kiddies/retards/freaks/gang-bangers called MySQL was eventually going to self-destruct and completely ruin itself. And now, thanks to the hard work of Marten Mickos, it's halfway there. See here. This little turd of a CEO has been making a real name for himself recently. Now he actually thinks he can sell his crappy open source database. Yeah. As if he could have his stupid GPL cake and eat it too. Listen, butthead. Nobody used your database when it was free. What in Eurohell makes you think you're going to be able to sell an enterprise version of it?

You better check your head, freak. Because your card is about to be pulled. In other words, you're about to crash and burn like a MySQL database running like, say, 5000 simultaneous queries.