All change at Sun. A new CEO at Zend. Ingres enjoys revenue up 32%. Purple Labs raises funding. Is open source a danger to Microsoft or will Danger bring open source to Microsoft? (Not) open source food. And more.

It’s a good week for business card printers
There was a rush of new appointment and departure announcements this week. As already noted today, Sun has confirmed the departure of Marten Mickos as Sun is combining its Software Infrastructure organization with its Database Group to form a unified open source product group under the leadership of Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of MySQL & Software Infrastructure.

Earlier in the week Monty Widenius confirmed that he has left Sun, along …

I’ve been collecting a bunch of tabs, MySQL related, that I think people might have missed during the holiday period.

Contrarian Minds: Marten Mickos - this is a great interview with former CEO of MySQL, now SVP of the Database Group, at Sun Microsystems. Its got a bit of interesting history, and thoughts about the future. There’s also some interesting photography.

Facebook is now at 150 million users. They grew quite a bit recently, it was just 140 million about a month or two ago.

Flickr has seen traffic reaching ten terabytes. As you know, Flickr runs MySQL, …

…is the title of this post written by Tim Bray a few days ago in which he outlined the directions he would like to see his employer take to improve its fortunes.

He also invited others to continue the thought process. Many have already done so (I’ll include the best in tomorrow’s CAOS Links post) and given my recent constructive criticism of Sun’s open source strategy I feel compelled to provide some answers as well as questions.

I’m sure there are lots of things Sun should be doing with relation to storage and servers and processors and client devices, but I’m going to stick to what I know. What would I do?

Light a fire under MySQL
When Sun announced its acquisition …

Marten Mickos sara' presente a un evento presso l'Universita' La Sapienza di Roma, Venerdi 30 Maggio.
Marten parlera' della sostenibilita' del modello Open Source, del presente e del futuro di MySQL.L'agenda e il modulo di iscrizione, per chi fosse interessato, e' disponibile qui.
In coda all'intervento di Marten, parleremo di scalabilita' e compareremo l'approccio alle architetture basate su MySQL rispetto a quelle utilizzate con altri database relazionali.
Giuseppe Maxia illustrera' il ruolo della Community nell'eco-sistema di MySQL e spieghera' come e' possibile contribuire al miglioramento dei prodotti e delle soluzioni. 
Ci sara' anche spazio per un'ampia sezione di domande e risposte... meglio approfittarne!
Spero di vedervi numerosi a Roma!
-ivan

I will be in Rome on May 30 to attend the meeting with Marten Mickos.
Giuseppe has posted a translation of the official announcement of the event, here.

I will be there as a member of the Community and as CTO of HoneySoftware (an Italian ISV, MySQL® Enterprise Ready Partner).

I am wondering if there will be also a meeting in the morning with customers (as Giuseppe posted) or not: the official agenda starts only at 4:30 pm.

See you there!

After all the fuss it appears that MySQL will be remaining open source after all. As Kaj Arno and Monty Widenius report, Marten Mickos announced at CommunityOne that the MySQL Server will stay open source, as well as the forthcoming encryption and compression backup features, which MySQL had considered making available only to paying customers.

“The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans …

Zack Urlocker says MySQL 5.1 has zero bugs. He may have been misquoted, or quoted out of context, but there it is. I’ll quote enough of it that you can’t take it out of context twice:

Mickos also said MySQL 5.1 has upgraded its reliability and ease of use over 2005’s v5.0.

“Now we can admit it, but this version is much improved over 5.0, which we weren’t totally happy with,” Mickos confided.

He reported that more than 1,300 bugs (997 in 2007, 386 so far in 2008) have been fixed in v5.1, and that, according to standard DBT2 benchmarks, the performance of v5.1 is 10 to 15 percent better than the previous version.

“This version now has zero bugs,” Urlocker told eWEEK.

You can check for yourself at the MySQL bug …

I?ve already taken a look at MySQL?s changing business model and the potential business drivers behind the company considering introducing new functionality under to Enterprise customers only. One area that I didn?t dive into was the impact on the company?s development model.

This, in fact, was the focus of Jeremy Cole?s initial take on the news as well as a significant response from Marten Mickos. ?MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise,? explained Jeremy.

?As I?ve discussed before, the …

A while ago I asked for people and/or organizations to sponsor development on Maatkit (formerly MySQL Toolkit) so I could take a week off work and improve the Table Sync tool. I asked for $2500 USD, but several companies have graciously offered to cover that and then some.

I'm very happy about this, as it will allow me to dedicate a solid week to fixing bugs and adding features. There's a lot of demand for the tools, and there are a dozen or so bug reports unresolved for the table-sync tool, which I personally want to fix as much as anyone. So I'm very grateful for the support.

Here are the companies who have promised their financial support:

MySQL AB

…

Yep, it's true. "MySQL Toolkit" technically infringes on MySQL's trademark. I haven't been given a mandate or cease-and-desist order or anything, but as Marten Mickos (MySQL's CEO) told me, anything that starts with the word "MySQL" sounds like it comes from the company, and this project doesn't come from MySQL.

Suggestions are welcome. I'm totally uninspired. "Toolkit" was the best I could do when I named the project to begin with.