Native XML Database

No, this post is not really about the movie “The Full Monty”. But, if you like British humor you might like to watch that movie someday.

I’m following some of the ongoing debate about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and the dispute over mySQL. The European Commission has not dropped its concerns about Oracle owning mySQL. What will Oracle do if the deal goes through? One can only wonder. You can take a look at Conor’s poll results to get a (non-scientific) read of what people think. Interestingly, the word is that Oracle has asked many of their big customers to write to the European Commission to push for unconditional acceptance of the Sun acquisition, including mySQL. This in turn has motivated Monty Widenius, the founding father of mySQL, to reach out to the mySQL community. In his blog he encourages mySQL users to also write to the European Commission. However, mySQL users ask that either mySQL be split off into a separate company or that Oracle be required to give legally binding guarantees for the “freedom” of mySQL. And so the saga continues…

Coming back to XML, I think it’s very interesting to look again at the XML features in mySQL. You may find that they are quite rudimentary compared to DB2 pureXML. I’ll provide more details on that in the next post.