Oracle last week quietely announced the addition of new extended capabilities in MySQL Enterprise Edition, confirming the adoption of the open core licensing strategy, as we reported last November.

The news was both welcomed and derided. Rather than re-hashing previous arguments about open core licensing, what interests me more about the move is how it illustrates the different strategies adopted by Sun and Oracle for driving revenue from MySQL, and how a single project can be used to describe most of the major strategies …

I’d like to focus this blog on using MySQL in the Enterprise and kickoff with a series of posts on “Enterprise Backup” building on the new features in both MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB) and MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM).  The new features in MEB 3.6 provide the capabilities to stream backups directly to another server, interface with backup media management software, and take advantage of tape encryption.  MEM 2.3.5 now has a Backup Advisor that helps monitor your backups.  In this and a subsequent  blog post, I’ll go through a progression of backups building up on a fairly straightforward vanilla single file backup with MEB as follows:

• Backing up to a Single File
• Add streaming to your Single File backup
• Stream your Single File Backup to a Media Management System
• Encrypt your Backup Tapes using your Media Management System
• Monitoring your Backup with MySQL …

Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle, been at Oracle since 1986, technology and architecture decisions, responsible for all open source at Oracle. Company-wide initiatives on standards management and security — http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/public/schedule/detail/12440.

Where MySQL fits within Oracle’s structure.

Oracle’s Strategy: Complete. Open. Integrated. (compare with MySQL’s strategy: Fast, Reliable, Easy to Use).

Most of the $$ spent by companies is not on software, but on integration. So Oracle makes software based on open standards that integrates well.

Most of the components talk to each other through open standards, so that customers can use other products, and standardize on the technology, which makes it much more likely that customers will continue to use Oracle.

Oracle invested …

One of MySQL’s notable projects was splitting the product into two editions: Enterprise Edition and Community Edition. This move alienated many in the community, and failed to create meaningful differentiation on either side, even with a team of people beating the community bushes for “contributions.” The net differentiation was ultimately Jeremy Cole’s SHOW PROFILES functionality, which made Community better than Enterprise. Sun put less effort into making this split work, and eventually they abandoned it.

But that could change under Oracle’s stewardship. Oracle’s promises to maintain a GPL …

CodePlex, patents and Linux code. An interesting few days for Microsoft open source.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

CodePlex, CodePlex, CodePlex!
Microsoft launched the CodePlex Foundation to facilitate open source contributions, and confirmed the departure of Sam Ramji.

Patents, Patents, Patents!
The OIN confirmed the acquisition of 22 patents formerly owned by …

I just wanted to tip my hat to the MySQL Enterprise Tools Engineering team for another great release of the Enterprise Monitor. Not to name names, but I want to give a special thanks to a team that always over delivers on a collective commitment to producing quality software. So, a mega thanks to:

Andy Bang, Sloan Childers, Darren Oldag, Eric Herman, Jan Kneschke, Kay Roepke, Mark Matthews, Bill Weber, Diego Medina, Marcos Palacios, Carsten "Pino" Segieth, Josh Sled, Keith Russell, Mark Leith, Heidi Bergh-Hoff, and Gary Whizin (and also welcome Michael Schuster!)

Yet another great job guys!

The new version, 2.1, was posted as GA early on Tuesday and it is quite possibly the best release of the Enterprise Monitor to date.

For those not familiar with the Enterprise Monitor, it is included in a MySQL Enterprise …

I just returned from a MySQL Federal Migration Boot Camp, jointly presented by Carahsoft and Sun/MySQL. It was a half-day seminar on the topic of migrating applications to MySQL, targeted to the US Government sector. Specifically, most of the audience seemed to be running Oracle, though there were some users of other systems (Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, Informix, etc).

Ronald Bradford presented the whole thing. I thought he did a great job giving a fair and balanced look at topics such as what types of applications are good candidates for migration, what gotchas you might encounter, etc. I’m sure someone looking at migrating in earnest would benefit from a whole day’s discussion (or a more focused engagement with a consultant), but I thought it was a great way to help people figure out whether …

As you may know, MySQL has a dual-licensing model. You can get the source under the GPL version 2, or you can buy a commercial license.

I’ve recently been hearing a lot of confusion about when you have to buy a commercial license. People I’ve spoken to wrongly believe that they’re required to purchase a license if they’re going to use MySQL in anything but a not-for-profit business, for example. I don’t know how these notions get started, but they do.

So when are you required to buy a commercial license? It’s very simple: when you want to do something with MySQL that the GPL doesn’t permit.

I am not a lawyer, and you should do your own legal research, but misinterpretation of the GPL is rampant and I think I should try to counteract the misinformation about it if I can. Note that in this article I will …

There have been plenty of blog entries and writings about the MySQL Query Analyzer, for what I think are good reasons. Labeling it a potential Killer App, causing many MySQL users to become paying Sun customers, may be a daring thing. However, the Query Analyzer might very well have what it takes. The key benefit of it is that it identifies the source of performance bottlenecks. In that sense, one could perhaps instead call it a profiler, as it analyses the set of all queries going on, as opposed to an individual one. One person to whom I described it said “ah, so …

Progress on the Open Source enterprise grade MySQL monitoring system;  the schema for Monolith version 2 has been designed. Due to the many suggestions for features and the interest it has received I’ve put this on the front burner. That said, here is some more info on the next steps I’ll be taking.

• Monitored servers will use a command line agent (called remotely) to pull information from both MySQL and the OS.
• Historical information will include all values from global status and global variables, as well as CPU/Memory/IO/Disk usage.
• Standard graphing functions - the ones in the list from the previous post - will gather information from various view tables that contain historical data that is collected from the agent script. User defined graphing will allow you to look at historical values over time for any of the various global status or global variable settings (integer based ones anyway). …