Surprise Survey Says MySQL And Java Will Prosper At Oracle

Despite widespread concern over the future of MySQL and Java following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January, a new survey has revealed that actually, most developers view Oracle as a better better steward of Java and MySQL than Sun.

The survey, from business intelligence (BI) provider Jaspersoft, polled 130,000 open source developers and enterprise customers in April, with over 500 resulting respondents. Most respondents held development and engineering roles within their organisations, and nearly 15 percent worked for organisations with more than 5,000 employees.

Interestingly, the survey found that most large organisations said they planned to use more Java than before, and 43 percent said that they expected to see MySQL innovate and improve faster under Oracle than under Sun.

Backing For Oracle Ownership

Another 80 percent of respondents believe the Java process will improve or stay the same. A full copy of the survey can be downloaded here.

The most popular alternative to MySQL cited by respondents who said they planned to switch databases away from Oracle, is PostgreSQL. But only five percent indicated they would switch.

However it seems that some elements of Oracle’s message to the market are not getting through. 59 percent of survey respondents were not aware that Oracle reorganised and established a completely separate MySQL business unit from Oracle’s traditional RDBMS business, which includes separate and dedicated engineering, professional services, sales and marketing.

“Our open source BI solutions are built with Java and many customers use our products to access data stored in MySQL, so we are interested in how our customers and community view the future of Java and MySQL under Oracle,” said Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft in a statement. “It’s clear that our enterprise customers and community are prepared to give Oracle the benefit of the doubt. And it’s likely that the software industry may see a resurgence in the use of Java, good news for the massive investments made by many organisations and professionals in this programming language.”

Jaspersoft could not field a spokesman at the time of writing.

Developer Concerns

The open source MySQL is the world’s most popular relational database, whereas Java is the most popular language for writing open source enterprise applications. Therefore the decision by Oracle to acquire Sun, first mooted back in April 2009, sent shivers down the spine of the open source community.

Indeed, MySQL founder Monty Widenius created a petition to try and stop Oracle from buying Sun, after he publicly announced his strong opposition to the deal in December. He joined Richard Stallman and two software industry groups who had already announced their opposition to the deal.

Indeed, Oracle faced months of legal wrangles, in particular objections in Europe over the fate of the open source MySQL database. Oracle ran sessions for Sun users in the US, as well as Britain and elsewhere, reassuring them that Sun products were safe at Oracle, and went to great lengths to address MySQL concerns.

And it seemed to work, despite some high profile resignations along the way. In April James Gosling, who created the Java language while at Sun, resigned from Oracle, but he assured developers that Java was safe in Oracle’s hands. He joined Jim Bray, a co-creator of XML, and Zack Urlocker, who ran engineering and marketing at MySQL, who also left early in the transition of Sun into Oracle. Sun’s open source chief Simon Phipps left in March.