Jonathan has a nice post with additional explanations on the MySQL deal, seeing as one or two folks have questioned it. (Note that the second link is for your amusement via Sun's Simon Phipps blog). Jonathan writes: "Where are the revenue synergies? The more interesting question is "where aren't the synergies?" Wherever MySQL is deployed, whether the user is paying for software support or not, a server will be purchased, along with a storage device, networking infrastructure - and over time, support services on high value open platforms. Last I checked, we have products in almost all those categories. In... READ MORE

In a speech celebrating NASA's fiftieth anniversary, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt urged NASA to be more collaborative with other agencies and even the general public. He suggested that Google's successes often result from opening up without knowing where the breakthroughs would occur.

While Schmidt acknowledged that government agencies like NASA can't wholly adopt Google's "shift and iterate" model whereby it throws a lot of projects at the wall to see what sticks, it

...can learn from open-software development and projects like Linux and MySQL, where collaboration is necessary. And the agency can learn about the value of flexibility from companies like Google, he said.

...

Memcached is a very popular open source object caching server. It was developed to speed up livejournal.com by Danga Interactive.  We use memcached for a lot of our sites.  We use it for different purposes but one main purpose is to cache query results so we don’t have to keep hitting database.  As most [...] …

Computer certification tests are often dreaded by those of us who have to take them. After many years of taking certification tests on everything from TCP/IP networks, Redhat Linux, network switches to Paypal programming, I am now on the other side of the coin as the MySQL Certification Team.

Recently I spoke with someone who did not enjoy taking certification tests. He found the cost of exams, finding a test center, studying for the exams, creating time in a an already busy schedule for the test date, and traveling to the test center a challenge but not the big issue. What really bothered him was the clock, omnipresent on the screen, quickly subtracting time until he had to finish.

He said his eyes were always drawn to the counter despite his best efforts. Like the raven in the famous Poe poem, the clock seemed to both mock and infuriate him. And he asked me what I did about the clock when I was testing.

…

What a week!
It started with a gift for all employees. A book that Lenz Grimmer has produced with great professionalism.

It is not for the general public. I am showing it here to give would-be employees one more reason to join the company. (Yes. It's business as usual. We are still hiring!)
Then the unexpected but very exciting news arrived, and perhaps a part 2 of this book won't be necessary.
(Update. Marten pointed out that this is not necessarily true, and the second part of the book will only be more exciting. Maybe so. The second part may just need a different sub-title.)
As part of the interesting changes in MySQL, there has been some side effects …

I was surprised that Sun could go from idea to acquisition on MySQL in just five weeks. What turns out to be more surprising, however, is that Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, had been talking with Marten Mickos of MySQL for over five years on precisely that topic, as Jonathan reveals on his blog. The real question, then, is why did it take so long?

Jonathan doesn't say, but the answer is clear: Marten wanted to build an IPO-able, independent MySQL. He eventually sold because it made sense (and, I suspect, because the prospect of living in the glare of Wall Street's impatient eye was not looking as appealing as it once had, but that's just Matt Asay personal conjecture).

Jonathan's post is a fascinating read. Here's just one of the sections I found revealing, coming on the …

mysqlreport v3.4 is ready which primarily fixes a bug in v3.3 concerning infiles for relative reports.

Changes in v3.4 are:

• Fixed bug: –relative infiles wouldn’t work unless the SHOW STATUS values were prefixed with a line matching: /Variable_name[\s|]+Value/. Now mysqlreport looks for Aborted_clients which should always be present. (thanks Debbie)
• Fixed formatting problem: Created Temp Table Size was too small for >99M
• Removed redundant %Total: column label from Slow line
• Added more debug info

Giuseppe Maxia (stress on the “i”, MaxIa, not MAxia) is now the new Community Team Leader. On Friday, our Data Charmer from Sardinia in Italy agreed to assume the responsibility of leading our Community Team, as I’m busy with my new appointment to Ambassador to Sun.

This means that Giuseppe now has a team of three Community Managers for each time zone, Jay Pipes in North America (NAM), Lenz Grimmer in Europe (EMEA), and Colin Charles in Asia Pacific (APAC). For the time being, Giuseppe reports to me.

Jay Pipes is the Program Chair for the upcoming MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, the main MySQL community event of the year.

One issue remains. “Community Team Leader” seems like a boring title. What title should we pick for Giuseppe? Given Giuseppe’s character and name of his blog ( …

I’m excited and a little bit worried about the aquisition of MySQL AB.

Sun has lots of billions, has lots of big customers and a great interest in competing with Oracle. These issues could be the ones to think about a more brilliant future for mysql.

I see in future a new SAMP paradigm (Solaris-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python).

But I’m also a little bit worried.