Here is Monty’s (co-founder of MySQL, left SUN some time ago) opinion. On a more light-hearted note, here are some Slashdot comments 🙂

Fro rho – a good example for why case sensitivity is important:

> Their string comparisons are case sensitive.

8.4 has citext. Or you can make an index with lower() on the appropriate columns.

IMO it’s preferable for software to not assume that "Helped my uncle Jack off a horse." and "Helped my uncle jack off a horse." are the same thing.

And from Just Some Guy we get the security angle on it:

Imagine an OS where strcmp() was case insensitive, and where it was used to compare hashed passwords when authenticating users. Realize that base64 is now really base36, and that you’re been throwing away approximately half the bits per character in the encoded password, and that your passwords are now about .5^$LENGTH as secure.

Have fun auditing your MySQL-based webapps to make sure that none of them use base64 password encoding coupled with case-insensitive searches!

The new Solaris licensing terms:

1s – free
0s – $10 per 0, minimum 100,000 0s

per processor core, multiplied by the number of megabytes of RAM installed in your system.

Oh, pardon me, this isn’t a production system, but is a development workstation? Allow me to refer you to the above licensing fee schedule. Thank you for choosing Oracle!

The new stock ticker:

Oracle (ORCL) announces that in order to emphasize the importance of this operation, and better reflect its activities, will switch its stock ticker name to JAVA.

🙂

My personal opinion is that this will accelerate people migrating to MySQL forks, like Drizzle, which is good, because it removes much of the old cruft, but migration is painful, if you’ve happen to rely (knowingly or unknowingly) on one of those “features”. But it has to be done (like migrating to Apache 2, PHP 5, etc).