So what's it like now that Sun now owns MySQL? The executive summary: a little weird. I was at the MySQL User Conference a couple of weeks ago and had a chance to talk with a lot of people in the community as well as many MySQL folks. Marten Mickos is now the head of database products at Sun. It's not very hard to figure out what Sun will do with MySQL products for the near future--pretty much what MySQL was doing already.

The real question for a lot of people is what will happen with databases like PostgreSQL and Derby. Sun has invested heavily in both of them, and PostgreSQL in particular is now quite fast. With the MySQL acquisition, Sun has an opportunity to run the table with multiple offerings that cover both enterprise applications as well as web and embedded. However, that would mean cutting down the MySQL roadmap to concentrate, for example, on scale-out rather than scale-up. It would also require thinking big to combine with …

The team just finished our second successful MySQL Con. Many thanks to Marten & Zack and all the folks at O’Reilly that put on such a great conference.

This year definitely had a different feel, and of course that had a lot to do with Sun’s influence. It felt like it was almost a new event, a chapter 2 for MySQL, and its ecosystem of vendors and customers. There were more people - I don’t know exact numbers, but it felt appeared to be twice as packed. The exhibit hall was the same, but we took up a bit more space than last year and certainly there were much fancier booths - ours included! We even gave away multiple prizes this year - our fun 8-ball tshirts, and a couple remote control helicopters. Scott Baird and Mike Hogan were the lucky winners this year.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is our fit with the MySQL customers. This year we met several of our own customers and users face-to-face - including an entire …

I’ve written in the past about how enterprise management vendors can act as “Gatekeepers of the Datacenter” by virtue of what technologies they do or don’t support as part of their management solutions. This rather lame dynamic is a big part of the reason why a lot of otherwise great technologies dont make it all the way into the traditional enterprise.

The problem gets further compounded when one of these “Gatekeepers” is also a platform or stack vendor. See, it’s hard to resist the temptation of delivering the absolute best management for IBM products from a Tivoli solution while shortchanging non-IBM ones. Or, to lay this on one of the aspiring members of the big 4… how about getting support for SQL Server on Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. Hmmm… I’m gonna guess it sucks because Oracle wants you using their database. Besides, who uses OEM that isnt already an Oracle db customer?

Lucky for us, Hyperic has always …

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Enterprise Content Management ensures the quick and reliable delivery, accessibility and long-term control of the most important information assets in an enterprise. These all require a strong, reliable architecture,? said John Newton, CTO and co-founder of Alfresco Software Inc. ?Hyperic HQ?s plug …