I'm listening to Scott Yara talk about Greenplum's commercialization of the PostgreSQL database, and comparing it to what Paul Weinstein (EVP, Business Development, MySQL). I had always viewed the two projects - MySQL and PostgreSQL - as direct competitors, and figured both were also competing with DB2 and Oracle. This is clearly not the case, at least, not for these two companies.
Who does MySQL compete with? With no one. Marten is on the record as saying that
We continue to have most of our deployments in areas where there was no database before. Either the application didn't use a database earlier, or the application is new. We are now seeing more and more migrations from old databases, but the majority of our installations are greenfield use.Marten has also stated that he's not interested in competing with Oracle - his goal is not to become the cheaper, "good enough" competitor to Oracle. He's looking to be the backbone of the web - a market that isn't well suited to monolithic databases like Oracle and DB2.
Greenplum, for its part, is taking PostgreSQL and making it into a business intelligence/data warehousing workhorse. This would seem to be easier for Oracle or DB2 to compete against, but would require both to rearchitect their databases for a purpose not originally intended. In other words, it would be insanely expensive and would take a long time.
In both cases, both companies are thriving on "asymmetric competition." They're competing on their own terms, not the incumbents'.
Posted by Matt Asay on July 25, 2006 01:23 PM
