* Michael Widenius <mo...@askmonty.org> [09/02/03 19:24]: > Konstantin> Monty, I disagree with this statement. Our current users use the > Konstantin> current versions of the server. It's a separate question of what > Konstantin> support we're willing to give them and for how long. > Konstantin> In the new versions we should hold high the expectations of new > Konstantin> users, and they are about standard compliance, and also about ease > Konstantin> of migration. > Sorry, but the above is not true. We have asked user over and over > again what they think about the standard and they have said it's not > critical or even important to them.; What is important that we don't > break their old applications!
Obviously, we talked with different people. > When going forward, we must prioritize old user to new ones! > The old ones are our current or customers in the near future. If we > make them unhappy we don't have a business anymore. There is a way to introduce incompatible changes and retain your existing users. Trying to stay compatible is, sorry for a popular cliché :-p, like trying to hide one's head in the sand: we can't, anyway, we broke backward compatibility with 4.1, 5.0, and will break it with 6.0 and 6.1. Change management is what we need to be doing instead. > The new users will mainly listen to old user if they should use MySQL > or not. If we make the old ones angry, we don't get new users. I yet have to find an old user who would be particularly happy about our sloppiness with input. Users put aside, I am yet to meet an(other) engineer who would support it. And engineers matter no less than users: without being able to attract new engineers to the project, we're dead in the water. Just look around: no other database has this "feature": postgres, the big 3, even our own drizzle killed it in the first 3 months after the fork. Any feature can be implemented. Nevertheless, clear and simple requirements is key to product simplicity and efficiency. MySQL doesn't even yet support SQL92 foundation, but is already a very convoluted piece of software. > Konstantin> MySQL server needs a vision. Sticking to expectations of existing > Konstantin> users is looking back into (not-so) glorious past. > > Our existing users is the second biggest user base for any database. > We reached this level as MySQL has worked to their expectations. > Trying to do things differently, like other companies have tried, will > just lead to failures. Old expectations are met, let's get over it. If we don't try to do things differently (but better), we could just as well stop new development completely. > People are using MySQL because it's different and can satisfy their > needs. Standards are useful, but not important for our current or > future users. Getting the job done and not having downtime, even when > upgrading, that is important! It's possible to meet the standard and provide an upgrade path to people. It's hard, but it's a payback for telling users for 15 years that sloppy input is okay. > I agree that we need to change things. I disagree that doing > incompatible changes without planning and carefull thinking about how > this will affect our user base is the right way to go. +1 on that. -- -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql?unsub=arch...@jab.org
