Welcome to the first entry of my blog.  My name is Martin Farach-Colton.  I’m co-founder and CTO of a startup called Tokutek.  I’m also a professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University. 

Tokutek is based on a bunch of research I did with Michael Bender (SUNY Stony Brook) and Bradley Kuszmaul (MIT).  The purpose of this blog is—more or less—to explain why we started this company.  What I mean is that we have a new way at looking at memory systems based on a relatively new algorithmic approach called Cache Oblivious Algorithmics.  I’d like to tell you what that means for systems and users.

Our new approach is encapsulated in the products we’ll be producing over the coming months and years.  But this is not the place to talk about our products.  Instead, I’d like to talk about my take on memory systems, and what can be done to improve databases and file systems.

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Article in Japanese on libmemcached:
http://alpha.mixi.co.jp/blog/?p=119

Other then being able to read the examples, I have no idea what it is saying... but I hear it is well wriiten:)

Its already a day old, but the news is as hot as ever. Sun will acquire MySQL before the end of the year.

Congratulation to MySQL and Sun!

And well done to all who were involved in making this deal, in particular, those I know personally: Marten, Monty, David, Zack and Kaj!

As I mentioned to Kaj, I am sure that MySQL has a very bright future under the wings of Sun. A deal for $1 billion made in 5 weeks can only mean both sides are extremely motivated to make it work.

I have just 3 concerns:

• I hope that the MySQL web-site will not disappear into the Sun web-site like the proverbial needle in a haystack! Sun's download page alone is as big as the MySQL web-site ;) I would like to see a mysql.sun.com, where we can find our way around easily.
  
  
• And the second is similar to the first but relates to the people. There is a massive difference …

The reaction to Sun's Intended Acquisition of MySQL ( Jonathan's blog, Video) is very positive at the end of this first day. Some of the references are:

Congratulations to Marten and team on Sun’s acquisition of MySQL today! This is a billion dollar stamp of approval on the importance of the LAMP stack. This also gives another strong backing to the business model which involves giving one’s software away for free to up to 99+% of users!

This announcement comes at an interesting time for Zmanda. Just last week we announced support for the Solaris platform for our Amanda Enterprise product line. With our industry leading MySQL backup solution, we now have full coverage of operating systems and database software from the new Sun!

A great day for open source software and business of open source software!

First off, kudos to Sun for valuing MySQL at this price. The deal represents ~36% of Sun's Cash & Cash Equivalents (of $2.7B) on hand at the end of their last quarter (Sept. 2007). But considering how cheap debt is these days, Sun could probably fund a portion of the deal through cheap debt. A reader commented on BEA and MySQL being founded in the same year, but BEA being sold for 8x more than MySQL. True, but BEA has ~$1.5B in revenue versus ~$60M for MySQL. When you take revenue into account, MySQL secured 3x more in acquisition price... READ MORE

YellowBot is presenting at Twiistup 3. You can vote for us and our Perl / Apache / MySQL based local search engine today Wednesday the 16th - if you are in the US - by sending an SMS with the text "yellowbot" to 66937.

Results are over here. :-)

Well, that's the news today, it was announced while MySQL has its not-quite-annual full staffmeeting in Florida.

Lots of people have already blogged on this, and various IRC channels have been chatting.... definitely interesting news, it seems. I didn't blog earlier because a) I don't follow any news that closely, as it tends to just warps your brain (try having CNN in the background for a few days - guh) and b) I wanted to have a little ponder on this first before writing something.

So... I think it's good news, overall. MySQL was heading for NASDAQ, and I've always regarded that as an evil mix of a bad idea with a very serious risk. Someone called the Sun acquisition a "safe haven" for MySQL, and in this context I agree with it. Better than floating on the stock market, and getting gobbled up.

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Everyone else is blogging about it, I may as well throw in my $0.02...

I'm glad Sun has purchased MySQL, but I think they have quite a bit of cleanup to do. To start with, I hope they release the Enterprise Monitor to the open source community. Its a good tool, but needs some extension.

I've heard that some folks are worried that PostgreSQL will become a white elephant. I'm not sure that will happen. I'd like to see a port of PostgreSQL as a new engine in the MySQL server....as crazy as it sounds.

Dave Rosenberg, Ashlee Vance, and I are doing an emergency Open Season podcast with Marten Mickos, CEO of MysQL, and Rich Green EVP of Software at Sun Microsystems, and they've said some things that blew me away. You'll get to hear them all when we publish the podcast ...