It would seem that the European Commission’s (EC) three month (to date) investigation has some screaming that there exists some form of monopoly rooted in evil and throwing the whole database universe out of balance.
While we all seem to like pointing fingers at Oracle, I personally like the point put out there by Ed Scannell that the EC has seemed to forget that there are other open source databases quite viable to keep Oracle in check, Postgres to name one. Said Ed Scannell “The Postgres open source database is not only a respected competitor in the open source database market, but has a feature set that allows it to compete against some higher-end proprietary database.”—noting that this alone should put the EC concerns to rest.
But if that wasn’t enough, Ed points to the distinction/usability/class of database between MySQL and Postgres by not only stating that “MySQL was built to accommodate the creation of lightweight, Web-based apps” and not “meant to create applications capable of handling heavy duty workloads”. Postgres on the other hand was “designed to create true enterprise-class applications” and actually giving “Oracle and IBM a run for its money”.
Now I’m not going to argue the enterprise quality of MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, and DB2 but Ed has a point when it comes to the whole open source / EC issue. I agree as he does that the EC has overlooked other viable open source databases and should just drop all this nonsense.