Happily Ever After?
July 24th, 2008
Once upon a time a small village of developers decided to create a database. This database would be different from anything the world had seen before. It would be built for web developers and wouldn’t be encumbered with all of the baggage that other fully fledged relational databases carry.
The village elders mapped out the architecture for the revolutionary new database. They encouraged everyone in the village, from the smallest child to the most experienced hunter, to contribute to the best of their abilities for the greater good. Word of the project leaked across the land and soon people from other villages joined in the project. The initial releases of the databases were a little shaky, but the villagers worked together to plug the holes.
The relational database giants mocked the little database. But the giants missed a very key thing - the village of database developers was connected to lots of other villages who were working in collaboration, all across the land. The network of villages was able to quickly add many of the features that the giants had, and even offer some new innovation.
Over time the villager’s database was starting to look at lot like the database from the giants. The giants felt somewhat threatened. One of the giants decided to invade a neighboring village that was particularly special. This village was providing some key features to the project and while it looked the same as it had before the invasion the villagers were nervous that it was a Trojan horse. The villagers persisted and engaged another village to ensure that the good work would go on.
One day everything changed. A giant from a faraway technology land of perpetual sun approached the villagers. This giant was trying desperately to change the weather in his land, and tempted the villagers with large pots of gold and special treasures. The villagers were mesmerized by the gold and followed the giant to his faraway land of perpetual sun. But soon there was trouble. As soon as the villagers entered the kingdom they realized that they had betrayed their own beliefs and became what they loathed. All the treasure in the world couldn’t heal their pain and disillusionment.
But one very brave villager decided to take the database back to what they had originally intended — a database for web developers. He stripped away all of the fancy features they had just added to be able to compete with the giants. As soon as he completed his task, clouds began to form and a light drizzle started to fall. What did it mean? Was this an omen?
We’ll have to wait and see.
Disclaimer: The above is a work of complete fiction by Emma McGrattan and Tracy Eiler. Any resemblance to actual technology companies or projects is purely coincidental.
July 24th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Very amusing, thinly disguised story of the rise of MySQL, the sell out to Sun and the emergence of Drizzle. Is the invaded village the InnoDB acquisition by Oracle? Do you think that Drizzle will succeed? Can you blog on what you really think about Drizzle and MySQL?
July 24th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Yes, you got it Ali! It was a comic look at the recent MySQL/Drizzle announcement. And the trojan horse reference was that uneasy and somewhat tenuous relationship they have with the Innobase folks inside Oracle.
By the way, I think they’re doing the right thing in forking Drizzle. I have always beleived that there was a place for a slimmed down product for web 2.0 apps and I’m glad to see them revisit that.
July 26th, 2008 at 1:42 am
*rofl*
IMHO, mysql should remain what it always was - sql-frontended cardbox for script kiddies (actually, it isn’t really speaking sql, only something similar sounding ;-o).
If you wanne have some masochistic fun, play around with mysql’s “timestamp” fields … ;-P
cu
July 27th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Emma,
Hah! Very funny. Thanks for writing that.
–Josh
July 28th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
[...] Sobre todo esto ha escrito una pequeña historia la Vicepresidente de Ingenieria de Ingres, Emma McGrattan: Happily Ever After?. [...]
August 1st, 2008 at 9:05 am
[...] View from 25B has a little fairy tale: “Once upon a time a small village of developers decided to create a database. [...]
August 5th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Very nice! I enjoyed that immensely.
I think there is definitely a market for a streamlined database made specially for building web applications … but, wait, isn’t that MySQL v6.0? 
August 5th, 2008 at 8:23 am
[...] McGrattan, Senior Vice President of Engineering for Ingres, recently wrote an amusing blog post that, well, made a certain database story more interesting than it was. Here’s a snippet: [...]