A few weeks ago, I was visiting the Chief Information Officer of a large commercial institution. He had with him the company's Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Security Officer (known as the "see-so"), and a series of lieutenants from various parts of their (large) development organization.

The Sun team had spent the day reviewing our progress together, and was finishing up with a product roadmap presentation. From what I sensed, it'd been a good day, so when I arrived, it was mostly to say thanks for the business, and ensure everyone had my contact info in the event I could help out going forward.

We had just closed the

Since the announcement, I've seen and heard near universal support for the relationship - most everyone wants to know where we're headed, so here's a quick overview of our initial plans.

Starting today, we're rolling out global programs to raise awareness and adoption of MySQL among more established enterprises - you'll see ads like this (to the right) targeting institutions and independent software/service vendors

In this blog I'm sharing the results of a series of tests designed to explore the impact of various MySQL and, in particular, InnoDB tunables. Performance engineers from Sun have previously blogged on this subject - the main difference in this case is that these latest tests were based on Linux rather than Solaris.

It's worth noting that MySQL throughput doesn't scale linearly as you add large numbers of CPUs. This hasn't been a big issue to most users, since there are ways of deploying MySQL successfully on systems with only modest CPU counts. Technologies that are readily available and widely deployed include replication, which allows horizontal scale-out using query slaves, and memcached, which is very effective at reducing the load on a MySQL server. That said, scalability is likely to become more important as people increasingly deploy systems with quad-core processors,

In this blog I'm sharing the results of a series of tests designed to explore the impact of various MySQL and, in particular, InnoDB tunables. Performance engineers from Sun have previously blogged on this subject - the main difference in this case is that these latest tests were based on Linux rather than Solaris.

It's worth noting that MySQL throughput doesn't scale linearly as you add large numbers of CPUs. This hasn't been a big issue to most users, since there are ways of deploying MySQL successfully on systems with only modest CPU counts. Technologies that are readily available and widely deployed include replication, which allows horizontal scale-out using query slaves, and memcached, which is very effective at reducing the load on a MySQL server. That said, scalability is likely to become more important as people increasingly deploy systems with quad-core processors,

In this blog I'm sharing the results of a series of tests designed to explore the impact of various MySQL and, in particular, InnoDB tunables. Performance engineers from Sun have previously blogged on this subject - the main difference in this case is that these latest tests were based on Linux rather than Solaris.

It's worth noting that MySQL throughput doesn't scale linearly as you add large numbers of CPUs. This hasn't been a big issue to most users, since there are ways of deploying MySQL successfully on systems with only modest CPU counts. Technologies that are readily available and widely deployed include replication, which allows horizontal scale-out using query slaves, and memcached, which is very effective at reducing the load on a MySQL server. That said, scalability is likely to become more important as people increasingly deploy systems with quad-core processors,

We released our official earnings on Thursday last week, after pre-announcing the news one week prior alongside the announcement of our intent to acquire MySQL.

Our second quarter financial announcement came down to this: we doubled our profitability compared to a year ago, with $260 million in net income on revenues of $3.6 billion, while generating $336 million in cash from operations. We also repurchased $750 million of our own shares within the quarter, and reaffirmed our guidance for

In the blog I outlined counter strategies that proprietary database companies might use to respond to the rise of Open Source Databases (OSDBs). One strategy was acqusition and I noted that MySQL, being privately held, was probably the most vulnerable.

The good news is that MySQL is no longer vulnerable. Sun has an unparalleled commitment to open source. No other organization has contributed

In the blog I outlined counter strategies that proprietary database companies might use to respond to the rise of Open Source Databases (OSDBs). One strategy was acqusition and I noted that MySQL, being privately held, was probably the most vulnerable.

The good news is that MySQL is no longer vulnerable. Sun has an unparalleled commitment to open source. No other organization has

In the blog I outlined counter strategies that proprietary database companies might use to respond to the rise of Open Source Databases (OSDBs). One strategy was acqusition and I noted that MySQL, being privately held, was probably the most vulnerable.

The good news is that MySQL is no longer vulnerable. Sun has an unparalleled commitment to open source. No other organization has

We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we're acquiring MySQL AB (http://www.mysql.com).

If you're interested in the financial details for the quarter, tune in to our conference call (see details on sun.com) today - we'll obviously have more to say as we release our formal results on January 24th.

But the biggest news of the day is... we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you're an industry insider, you'll know what that means - we're acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world's most popular open source database.

You'll recall I wrote about a customer event a few weeks ago, at which some of the world's most

I can understand why they're upset - when Linux first came on the scene in Sun's core market, there were some here who responded the same way, asking "who can we sue?" But seeing the future, we didn't file an injunction to stop competition - instead, we joined the free software community and innovated.

One of the ways we innovated was to create a magical file system called ZFS - which enables expensive, proprietary storage to be replaced with commodity disks and general purpose servers. Customers save a ton of money - and administrators save a ton of time. The economic impact is staggering - and understandably threatening to Net App and other proprietary companies. As is all free innovation, at some level.