We're sponsoring an important webinar series along with Sun/MySQL starting this week on June 25th - The Kimball Group Data Warehousing Educational Webinar Series.  This webinar series will introduce the audience to data warehousing concepts and best practices, and will cover the history and evolution of data warehousing, provide an overview of dimensional modeling, and review the full life cycle of designing and implementing a data warehouse.  Part 1, on June 25th at 1:00P PDT, is on Data Warehousing Fundamentals.

There are two key reasons why we think this webinar series is important:

• First, we believe this webinar further advances data warehousing in the MySQL world. There is a whole new generation of database developers in the MySQL community that are at various stages of understanding data warehousing - what it …

Why was Teradata able to become the leader of data warehousing at the super high-end (e.g. greater than 25 TB’s)?  Why was Netezza only the second pure-play data warehousing company to go public by focusing on the 10 – 25 TB range of opportunities?  Why did Oracle after so many years of denial finally announce a joint hardware / software product for data warehousing with HP, the Exadata data warehouse server?  Why did Microsoft acquire DATAllegro, one of the earlier data warehousing appliances? Why are there now dozens of data warehouse appliances available on the market today, and – more importantly – how should a customer choose which one to purchase? 

In all these cases, the vendors have listened to the market and concluded that the most optimal way to serve the customer is through a true data warehouse appliance.  Given that there are so many flavors of appliances, though, here are some things to …

Following the launch of the Open Database Alliance some people have assumed that it is only a matter of time before MariaDB becomes the de facto replacement for MySQL.

That assumes that Oracle will allow the development of MySQL to stagnate, either deliberately or through neglect - something that we have expressed our doubts about, but even if that were the case it appears that the GPL (or more to the point MySQL’s dual licensing strategy) may restrict the potential for MariaDB.

Curt Monash recently raised the question of whether closed-source storage engines can be used with MySQL (and, by …

So, is Oracle’s acquisition of Sun good for MySQL or not so much?  And, specifically what does it mean for data warehousing on MySQL, which is one of the top 5 use cases for the leading open source database?  While there are mixed views in the market about the fate of MySQL, it’s usually pretty easy to predict Oracle’s behavior - they are a for-profit company looking to maximize their return on investment and protect their own commercial database business. 

For what they’re worth, my own views on the subject can be summarized as follows: 

• (1) Oracle will not kill MySQL. As I mentioned to Scott Denne from VentureWire the week of the Oracle/Sun …

Oracle buys Sun. Sun previews MySQL update, makes GlassFish Portfolio, OpenSSO and OpenDS available on EC2. Numerous partner announcements from the MySQL conference. Red Hat maps open source adoption. And more.

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Oracle to acquire Sun
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or like me you decided to take a few inappropriately-timed days off) you probably noticed that Oracle announced an agreement to acquire Sun this week. Jay delivered our assessment on Oracle’s open source credentials, while I followed up with some …

“We’re both in the transportation business. We have a 747, and they have a Toyota.”

The comparison of Oracle’s database and MySQL, made by Oracle president Charles Phillips at the 2004 Vortex Conference was undoubtedly meant as a criticism, but it so graphically demonstrated the differing business strategies and selling-points of the two products that MySQL executives began citing it themselves.

It is also a comparison that explains how the two products could potentially co-exist within a single company, as they seem likely to do following the announcement that Sun has agreed to be acquired by Oracle.

Much of the MySQL-related coverage of the impending acquisition has focused on the likelihood of Oracle killing-off the …

At today's keynote by Mark Callaghan one of the new options he talked about are table change logs. He mentioned they might be of use to external applications, like Flexviews, which he mentioned but not directly. He asked if the guy who wrote it was in the audience, so I got to wave my hand and yell 'Flexviews!'.

I caught up with Mark at the Facebook party this evening. I had a chance to talk to him not only about the change logs, but also about Kickfire and the SQL chip. He asked me what I thought about working at Kickfire and I smiled and said I love it. I think I said "I've never been able to join a billion row table to a hundred million row table, sort, group and get results back in less than a minute" and I'm sure the smile never left my face.

As far as the table change logs, he verified:

• 
  
• The global transaction id will be stored in the table
  
• OLD and NEW …

The Kickfire appliance is designed for business intelligence and analytical workloads, as opposed to OLTP (online transaction processing) environments.  Most of the focus in the MySQL area right now revolves around increasing performance for OLTP type workloads, which makes sense as this is the traditional workload that MySQL has been used for.  In contrast,  Kickfire focuses squarely on analytic environments, delivering high performance execution of analytical and reporting queries .

A MySQL server with fast processors, fast disks (or ssd) and lot of memory will answer many OLTP queries easily.  Kickfire will outperform such a server for typical analytical queries such as aggregation over a large number of rows.

A typical OLTP query might ask “What is the shipping address for this invoice?”.  Contrast this with a typical analytical query, which asks “How much of this item did we sell in all of …

The Kickfire MySQL Appliance is offically launched!

We just announced today, along with a new customer, and strategic partnerships with ten leading service companies including Percona, the MySQL performance experts.

Look for more news next week from Kickfire as we head into the MySQL conference. Kickfire will also give a keynote on the first day of the conference and will make a surprise announcement! Stay tuned …

The MySQL marketplace today is far more complex then simply choosing between a particular version of MySQL that Sun/MySQL produces.
The MySQL server product in general is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2, however you should carefully review the MySQL Legal Policies as a number of exceptions and different license agreements operate for companion tools such as MySQL Cluster, MySQL client libraries and documentation for example.

Looking into the MySQL ecosystem for products, I’ve produced the following categories:

• Sun/MySQL Official Products
  • MySQL Versions
• MySQL Variants
  • Community
  • Enterprise
  …