The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

Bryan Cantrill wrote this blog post on the death of Solaris.  Here’s a bit like the most about it, which talks about the proprietary software vs. Open Source:

Assuming that this is indeed the end of Solaris (and it certainly looks that way), it offers a time for reflection. Certainly, the demise of Solaris is at one level not surprising, but on the other hand, its very suddenness highlights the degree to which proprietary software can suffer by the vicissitudes of corporate capriciousness. Vulnerable to executive whims, shareholder demands, and a fickle public, organizations can simply change direction by fiat. And because — in the words of the late, great Roger Faulkner — “it is easier to destroy than to create,” these changes in direction can have lasting effect when they mean stopping (or even suspending!) work on a project. Indeed, any engineer in any domain with sufficient longevity will have one (or many!) stories of exciting projects being cancelled by foolhardy and myopic management. For software, though, these cancellations can be particularly gutting because (in the proprietary world, anyway) so many of the details of software are carefully hidden from the users of the product — and much of the innovation of a cancelled software project will likely die with the project, living only in the oral tradition of the engineers who knew it. Worse, in the long run — to paraphrase Keynes — proprietary software projects are all dead. However ubiquitous at their height, this lonely fate awaits all proprietary software.

There is, of course, another way — and befitting its idiosyncratic life and death, Solaris shows us this path too: software can be open source. In stark contrast to proprietary software, open source does not — cannot, even — die. Yes, it can be disused or rusty or fusty, but as long as anyone is interested in it at all, it lives and breathes. Even should the interest wane to nothing, open source software survives still: its life as machine may be suspended, but it becomes as literature, waiting to be discovered by a future generation. That is, while proprietary software can die in an instant, open source software perpetually endures by its nature — and thrives by the strength of its communities. Just as the existence of proprietary software can be surprisingly brittle, open source communities can be crazily robust: they can survive neglect, derision, dissent — even sabotage.

Database Popularity Index

Have a look at Red9’s Database Popularity Index, which is updated now on a monthly basis.  Last year I blogged about a similar study.

One thing that is still mind-boggling to me is the total number of different database engines – over 300!  I know there is a constant need for better and more powerful databases, but 300?  Sounds like too much to choose from.

One other thing that I find slightly surprising is the popularity of the Microsoft Access.  Really?  With so much to choose from, people still stay with Access?  What am I not getting here?

Database Engines Ranking

db-engines-ranking-table

DB-Engines.com provides some insight into some of the most popular database engines (312 of them to be precise).  Nothing too surprising there – Oracle and MySQL leading the charts, but it’s nice to have the numbers and trends.

db-engines-ranking

There are, of course, many different ways how the popularity can be calculated.  Their method is based on the popularity of each engine in a variety of online outlets, from Google Search to social networks.

  • Number of mentions of the system on websites, measured as number of results in search engines queries. At the moment, we use Google, Bing and Yandex for this measurement. In order to count only relevant results, we are searching for <system name> together with the term database, e.g. “Oracle” and “database”.
  • General interest in the system. For this measurement, we use the frequency of searches in Google Trends.
  • Frequency of technical discussions about the system. We use the number of related questions and the number of interested users on the well-known IT-related Q&A sites Stack Overflow and DBA Stack Exchange.
  • Number of job offers, in which the system is mentioned. We use the number of offers on the leading job search engines Indeed and Simply Hired.
  • Number of profiles in professional networks, in which the system is mentioned. We use the internationally most popular professional networks LinkedIn and Upwork.
  • Relevance in social networks. We count the number of Twitter tweets, in which the system is mentioned.

It seems objective and representative enough to me.

Google vs. Oracle : API vs. implementation

Slashdot is running the story about the Google vs. Oracle court case.  I thought this bit was rather brilliant:

Schwartz’s second attempt at the breakfast menu analogy went much better, as he explained that although two different restaurants could have hamburgers on the menu, the actual hamburgers themselves were different — the terms on the menu were an API, and the hamburgers were implementations.”