This blog post of mine about the new MySQL Emulation Layer in PostgreSQL 9.0 was (more of less obvious) an April joke. Most readers have guessed it right.
On the other hand: the idea, that this joke is based on, is very real: during the last conferences and exhibitions which I have attended, many visitors asked us (the PostgreSQL booth staff) about the future of MySQL.
Guess what - we don’t know! Please ask Larry ;-)
The very next question was usually about porting a MySQL database to PostgreSQL. Many companies selling products with MySQL included are irritated - and frustrated: “Can I still buy a MySQL license in a year or two?” - “And if yes: how many bucks will Oracle request for this?”. “Will Oracle still offer support or will they try to convience everyone to use Oracle database?” At this point many companies start to look for some other database - and PostgreSQL is there, happy to help.
One note for me for future April jokes, or other posts: I really must have more webserver and database power available ;-)
During the day everything was ok - and then the Americans woke up and my blog was hammered, access count skyrocked during one hour, server load exploded. Someone added the blog post on reddit.com, this was the cause for a good part of yesterdays traffic.
This blog is running inside a virtual machine, both webserver and database. During the evening (European time) I decided to move the database to another host. This did help to bring the blog up again and serve all requests without any further trouble. Yesterday I have seen as many requests as usually in a full month. Very nice.