I heard from a few people about my post on the relative valuations of MySQL, JBoss, Zimbra, and XenSource. Because of a lack of data on growth trajectories, I didn't factor those into my light analysis, but anyone buying a company would seriously factor this in. In fact, as one person commented, "multiples are a factor of growth by definition of discounted cash flow based valuations."

He's absolutely right. Part of the reason that MySQL got such a great valuation is that it has significantly improved its growth in the past year. Much of this came from productizing its services (i.e., the distinction between MySQL Enterprise and Community), such that it had a compelling value proposition beyond vanilla support. …

Went to the MySQL Performance Tuning Class last week. I would highly recommend it to any DBA new to MySQL, or any MySQL DBA looking to boost their tuning skills and understanding of some of the various features as they relate to performance.The next few posts will have to do with information I gleaned from that class...It's always good to understand what's happening underneath the covers when it

We finally got WB 5.0.12 released. It was a bit complicated to get it out because everybody was on his way to the MySQL All Company Meeting here in Orlando, Fl, and with all the meetings going on. 5.0.12 is a next important step to get closer to RC. We did not fix as many bugs as for the last releases - partly caused by the vacations around X-Mas but as well because the number of serious issues is going down. There is still a lot to be done though but the light at the end of the tunnel is clearly visible already.

Btw., if somebody did not get the news yet (which I don’t think is possible), MySQL has been aquired by Sun. It is the biggest topic here at the All Company Meeting and I think it was the best thing that could happen for MySQL as a product and for the community. What it means for the MySQL Workbench project for the moment is, that nothing will change. We will continue our road to GA as planned and are currently putting together …

Since Sun announced its acquisition of MySQL for $1bn, there have been some suggestions that perhaps Sun paying too much for the open source database vendor. Calculating the multiple for MySQL has proved difficult because there are no official figures to go on, and also because many of the unofficial figures that are floating around are contradictory.

Prior to the acquisition being announced a number of revenue figures for MySQL had been publicly disclosed. For example:

• 2006 revenue of $50m, according to Cnet. …

Insertion and Queries

Databases are complicated beasts, but I’d like to focus on the storage engine, just the part that talks to the storage system, and doesn’t have to worry about SQL, etc.: just transactions, concurrency, compression, updates and queries.  In the next couple of blog entry, I’d like to just focus on updates (insertions and deletions) and queries (point and range).  (This delineation between the
front end and the storage engine is clearly architected in MySQL.) And in particular, I’d like to explore which features of a disk limit performance for which operations.

The question is how fast can these operations go?  Point queries are the slow ones, so let’s start with them first.  Suppose you have data on a disk—say a 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.  It has a disk seek time 14ms and transfer rate of around 69MB/s [See tomshardware.com] Now imagine filling the disk with a …

Alright so I thought I might throw my $0.02 into the whole fanfare about Sun acquiring MySQL. I think it was a surprising but good move. Sun has a lot to provide, is likely looking to strengthen their platform, and appears to be committed to open source. While it remains to be seen whether their promise of keeping MySQL relatively unchanged still needs to be proven, I tend to believe that they understand the value of MySQL (they certainly should given the price tag) and would not do anything to jeopardize that. MySQL is, after all, the world's most popular open source database (according to MySQL, but I think that is still true).

This move I think is good for MySQL as well (maybe even better). For one, it seems like it would protect them for a buyout by a competitor. Now realistically, if Oracle bought out MySQL, the GPL'd parts of it would be forked off quite quick and the remaining alienated users would likely move to PostgreSQL or …

Here are a few photos from our announcement in Orlando earlier this week.  It's been crazy busy, but the response has generally been very positive from our community, our customers and our employees. 

It's been fun to have some pretty cool Sun folks at our company meeting in Orlando including Rich Green, James Gosling, Ian Murdock, Bill Shannon, Karen Padir, Rich Lang, Dave Douglas, Eduardo Pelegrillo and others. (Also, thanks to Tobias for the photo of the long-haired guy playing RockBand at our party Wednesday night.) 

No doubt there will be a few gotchas here and there as we work out integration details, but I'm stoked.  Tired, but stoked. 

Still shell-shocked from the announcement of Sun's intent to acquire MySQL, I was among the many at Martin's presentation for whom his words seemed to miss our ears and whose eyes failed to register what was on the slides before us. A sea of silence. Martin quite nerviously continued on while, for me, I was stunned, expecting an IPO announcement and thinking that what was before me was a

is Jeb Miller. Not only does he manage to QA and break cluster (of course the whole point of QA) - this morning he brought in coffee. Marvellous. Brilliant. oh, and awesome.