While I understand it is unfashionable here to know what you're talking about before posting comments --- God forbid reading the fine article .....

• The law specifies up to â600k for the most serious offences, the range being â300-â600k
• The law was passed about 15 years ago, even before USers realized that instead of the freest were among the most oppressed/subject to surveillance in the world
• The law was intended to STING, not KILL (actually, to be a strong deterrent) for spanish SMEs. To that extent, it has had wonderful performance --- I can only recall a handful of serious fines since it was passed by the Parliament. The fines haven't had to be increased since then, for everybody mostly "behaved"
• This is Europe, where the newest GDPR is being implemented. Do you even have something comparable? Of those, Spain was the earliest (and most careful) in protecting its citizen's rights to Privacy.
  Most commenters can't even dream of this level of protection.
• Again: this is Europe, not some poor South-American of African country. Our 2016' GNP was ~$1.25 TRILLION, or a bit less than half UK's, so not bad at all!. This means the "this is Spain" comment it totally out of place.

Because the LAW specifies the maximum fine to be â600k per class of offence (i.e. regardless of the number of violations -- this is not anglosaxon law) So, this would amount to 3 x â400k ---- the range being â300k-â600k for the most serious offences

Admittedly, the fine amounts haven't been modified (i.e. increased) since the law was passed ~15yr ago.... but no sane spanish company would get itself in a position where it could be fined to this leves by AEPD (potentially getting ousted from any and all contracts with our Government as a result!)

Ahhh... I beg to differ. SkySQL's MariaDB and/or Percona might save it. Oracle could only kill it via complete stagnation.
Anybody remember how much it took from 5.5 to 5.6, and how much better MariaDB is than the latter?

/ Experienced former MySQL DBA(15 years) and PostgreSQL DBA/Consultant now, for good.
(still gotta keep some high-perf Marias due to Magento's sillyness)

Plus: Oracle fanboi-troll wannabe, why don't you reveal yourself? Scared to provide real arguments/credentials?

Rather, Oracle is overrated.

Recently seen Postgres (9.4.4) give 40+% performance improvement over Oracle (11.2).
Plus, it can do *now* many things that Oracle can't.

(Senior Systems Architect & Admin + DB Performance consultant here)

To begin with, Gibraltar is not a country (and never was). At most a highly dispute colony of the UK in former spanish territory. Once again: editors, please check your facts (and update the posting ASAP!) Yes, I'm a native spaniard, by the way. My personal opinion is that Gibraltar is a full-blown anachronism kept there truly because of pride and economic interests --- it is in fact mostly used just as a tax haven. However british the gibraltarians might want to feel (because it is highly convenient for most of them), they end up crossing essentially daily to Spain in order to shop, enjoy themselves or even for business reasons. Someone with more direct experience and more direct facts please expand on this.

Like, say.... "Plonk!" ? (K-lined)

After all you guys have got tired of joking about Hans Reiser, there is at least one thing he did foresee: the need for transactional interfaces (semantics in interaction) for Filesystems. It was in Reiser4/5/6's design document, "future vision" at least five years ago.

> But, what was the original meaning of "beta" to begin with ? The second letter of the greek alphabet, obviously :-)