Actually, it wasn't IBM that shot Informix. A little bit before the IBM takeover, Informix took over a company called Ardent. Within 6 months all the Informix senior management had gone, replaced by the Ardent people.

And those databases owned by Ardent (UniVerse and UniData) are still being developed by IBM. Last I heard they were one of the fastest-growing (by sales) products in the entire DB2 division.

I *HOPE* to hear a lot more about them - they are a member of the Pick / MultiValue / PostRelational family of databases.

Although most people don't want to believe, the fact is relational database management systems are CRIPPLED by C&D's rules, and multivalue databases get round this. To give you and idea, some company tried to port their database to Oracle. Consultants spent SIX MONTHS trying to get the new system running faster than the old one, and finally announced to management "we're 10% faster". Only to be extremely embarrassed as the "dinosaur" in charge of the old system asked "you've got a twin-Xeon 800, and you're *proud* of being just 10% faster than a PENTIUM 90?"

Cheers,
Wol

IBM really does hate to deal with GPL and LGPL products, every use of such products have to be approved by the army of lawyers (I had some unpleasant subcontracting experience regarding it). In case of Linux, they simply had no choice. In case of MySQL, there are reasonable alternatives owned by IBM.

BTW CloudScape (aka Apache Derby) is probably one thing from Informix acquisition that is really alive.

The only unique thing that IBM could get from Sun that it really wants is a control over Java platform. Other I think will be ripped to pieces and tasty ones will be consumed.

So I think that MySQL will spinned out into own technology project just like Eclipse platform and more or less forgotten by IBM.

Yea, McNutty and the pony-tailed-one are both pains...

But, back to the article. Everyone keeps forgetting that one of the all time best databases was Informix, which IBM bought about a decade ago and has summarily shot and put out to pasture. Oh, its still technically alive, just hasn't received any updates in about 9 years. So, do we really think that IBM with their prized DB2, and that other database (aka Informix) would really do anything of benefit with MySQL? No, they'll shoot it too.

Come on, wise up, this acquisition stinks, with about 95% product overlap, virtually everything Sun has will be killed. I understand wanting changes at Sun, they've needed real change for a decade now. But selling to IBM is the worst move for everyone, except maybe IBM. Far better would be to go private (and then can McNutty and pony tail boy), or sell out to someone who could do something with the Sun portfolio (Like Dell, Apple or Fujitsu)

IBM just needs to wait until either Sun shares have dropped to $0.01, or until the stockholders smarten up and ditch McNutless and Blackie (Schwartz).

I doubt anyone else wants to deal with those two hyper-egotistical clowns.