Cambridge UK, April 7, 2016 – In a move reflecting the increasing acceptance and adoption of open source software and the principles behind it, Redgate Software has released community editions of its MySQL database tools. Alongside the paid-for enterprise editions, MySQL Compare and MySQL Data Compare are now available free for non-commercial use.
Redgate first came to prominence when it launched SQL Compare, which has since become the industry standard for comparing and deploying SQL Server database schemas and data. The company now has a complete suite of database tools and has further developed many of them for use in the Oracle and MySQL environments.
MySQL Compare and MySQL Data Compare save users hours of work comparing and deploying MySQL databases, while ensuring accuracy. They eliminate mistakes by finding and fixing the errors caused by differences between databases, and generate the SQL scripts necessary to deploy changes.
The launch of the community editions of the tools is in response to changes happening right across the software industry.
In late 2014, for example, Microsoft open sourced its .NET software framework and released a free community edition of its integrated development environment, Visual Studio. Other software companies are developing proprietary tools in the open source space, and offering community versions as well as commercial versions.
Many, like Berlin-based 3T, see it as a natural part of their business model. 3T was founded by three NoSQL enthusiasts who wanted MongoDB users to have access to the same kind of development tools available to relational database users. As a consequence, they created MongoChef, a multi-platform data browser and editor for MongoDB. While it is a paid-for tool, a community edition is also available.
As Co-Founder Thomas Zahn says: “Coming as a developer from a traditional RDBMS to a NoSQL database like MongoDB can be a truly liberating experience. It can also be frustrating because there aren’t many tools to help you with editing, searching, importing and exporting, management and connectivity. We wanted to resolve that with a commercial product, but give individual users the opportunity to enjoy the same advantages with a non-commercial edition."
David Atkinson, Head of Product Strategy at Redgate, concurs: “Many charities and educational institutions as well as individual users turn to open source software in an effort to lower costs. The flipside is, while there’s no upfront cost, there is an ongoing maintenance cost. Paid-for tools like MySQL Compare make the often complicated task of deploying databases simple. By releasing a community edition, everyone benefits.”
There are advantages for Redgate as well. David Aktinson concludes: “With a community edition, more users will adopt our tools and become familiar with them, we’ll get more feedback to develop them further, and if users move to SQL Server or Oracle, they’ll find familiar tools waiting for them.”
