Is MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server dead?

Tell you why? My 5 minute spec-sheet analysis, if that.

Hrrmph, not relational with a convoluted byzantine pricing structure, all in the “clouds”. Nix on query, nix on cost, nix on data retention.

Many start-ups pay for web hosting.

Pretty much all paid web hosting plans come with MySQL or equivalent support.

The only way I can see someone using this, is if they have limited databases with their plan.

(For example, my plan allows up to 10 MySQL databases. If I need more than 10, this service from Amazon would be a great solution.)

One reason? Speed. The pipe is too slow where speed matters. Sure, there’d be cases where speed is not important and having the data ase hosted by Amazon, up on the cloud, would work. But for high traffic, responsive applications, it’s not the killer you suggest.

Robert

Actualy to few startups are going into datacenters what about 6 apart who totaly failed with a single point of failure.

And as some one has said ACID! even small sites need that i have had to help one of my seo clients when his back end lost its referential integrity lucky for him it was only 3 or 4 orders and I was able to reassemble the orders by manualy working out which rows belonged to which order

Good job for him i spent 5 years working with orracle and 4 with sqlserver

A sensationalist headline with zero content in the body of the post to go along with it? Someone’s getting lazy.

Honestly, why go and buy a 60 server cluster *cough*Edgeio*cough* when you don’t even have any fucking customers or revenue? I know it’s good practice to prepare for scaling, but going out and buying enough capacity to serve millions large data queries a day right off the bat makes zero economic sense for the average startup.

In most cases, there isn’t even a reason to invest in a VPS, let alone a cluster, unless the amount of demand the service experiences dictates that it makes economic sense to do so. Blowing a budget on establishing a huge infrastructure is stupid, and any startup that does this without any justification other than “just in case” deserves to go tits up.

While I think Amazon’s service is a good offering, I don’t think dedicated SQL/ORACLE/MySQL hosts have anything to worry about.

Scoble just keeps looking for novel ways to jump the shark.

Is the database dead?
I think the short answer is no, but the game is changing rapidly, and Amazon is at the vanguard. I’ve collected some thoughts: http://info-architects.net/2007/12/15/amazon-simpledb-death-of-the-database/

PS: Facebook already a has a Data Store as part of the Platform API.

This system of sensational headlines might actually work if done right.

I see your role as ‘famous tech blogger’ to focus our (those of us who don’t have the time to stay in touch) attention on the news of the day. This piece does that.

What I am also looking for is well regarded opinions on the news of the day. I don’t expect those opinions to come from ‘famous tech blogger(s)’ or the following bunch of joe schmo comment(er)s.
But this is where I would like to see you play another role. Being ‘famous tech blogger’ you have a really great bunch of contacts in the field. Get them to comment on the things you post. What would bring value to this piece are listening to what a architect at oracle, microsoft, ibm, mysqlab or google have to say, and of course what “real” customers have to say.
The sensational headline seems to have gotten some sensible people to leave a comment here.

Having said that, I hate the CNN stories where they stop random guy on the street, to get his opinion on the latest fed rate cut. The problem with living in a world where access to information is instantaneous, is you also have instantaneous acesss to OPINIONS (majority of which is just noise). I dont want to wade through 30 comments to find 3 insightful ones. You do that for me and I have reason to come back here again even if the headline is just sensational.

dc: thanks. I will definitely be tracking this story with other players over time. What Amazon is doing is quite interesting, even if the headline I used is a bit over the top. The reason the headline worked, though, is BECAUSE Amazon IS disrupting other “platform” businesses and doing so in a major way.

This is such ridiculous crap. I’m never clicking a link to this blog again.

Just to be fair and make a real comment, though, Scoble, whatever happens in the startup sector DOES NOT disrupt the industry. Startups make up a very very small portion of the tech industry and usually run on free or low-cost solutions.

If you want to talk about “disrupting” you have to look at the enterprise market and see if anyone in any IT position will honestly consider dropping a mature and total-control option like Oracle to use a limit service from Amazon. That’s where all the money is at for providers like Oracle and MS, not the punks in SF bootstrapping worthless apps.

SimpleDB is not a relational database at all, and so it is very different from Oracle Database or MS SQL Server. It is a “simple” key-value database.

I love it when people say “I’m never clicking a link to this blog again” and yet have enough courtesy to leave a comment describing such future actions for the rest of us to read.

“This is such ridiculous crap. I’m never clicking a link to this blog again.”

I’ll second that, wholeheartedly.

But then I should have known better. What’s far worse is that more of the (obviously technically educated) comments don’t ridicule this poser.

@Robert Finlayson: I’m leaving this “courtesy” comment in hopes that others will snap out of their haze, and wake up and smell the BS being shoveled.