Great to see that the MySQL team has been rewarded for the hard work they've done over the years.

Digging through my email archives I've found several email exchanges with Monty from the early periods of PHP and Zend (late 90s) where we had several discussions around best ways to implement hash tables, the growth of our businesses, and the communities. Back then their company was still T.c.X (http://www.tcx.se/) and a very lean operation. In 2000 we finally met in person for the first of many times in Tel-Aviv when Monty and David joined the first PHP developer's meeting.

Since then a lot has been going on. Probably the two most significant changes were the acceptance of open-source software for business critical environments; the second was a realization after the burst of the bubble that the Java/Enterprise database combination was not the only way to build business critical Web …

Part of what makes me very happy about our Sun deal is the interest Sun has expressed in learning from us. That has been evident in all the various meetings here in Orlando — be it with the founders, with the individual departments, or in front of the entire audience.

So as a way to teach Sun a first lesson, I had prepared a gig for the end of the presentations during the morning. We have a tradition of singing songs in our company, stemming from our Scandinavian heritage. “We take this very seriously”, I had heard Rich Green comment. And I’m happy he meant it in a very respectful manner: Corporate culture is important. Drinking songs themselves are meant to be purely fun, and not taken seriously, although they are surrounded by plenty of fairly rigid tradition.

In order to make it light for our future colleagues from Sun, as well as our own recent recruits as well as others unfortunate enough not to know …

If you follow the MySQL world at all, or you just have your eyes open, you have probably noticed that an agreement has been reached for Sun to acquire MySQL AB for about one billion dollars. Quite a few people have asked for my thoughts on the matter, so I will provide them publicly here for all. Overall, I see this as a mostly good thing.

I think that Sun has a very good chance of leading MySQL better than MySQL. At the same time, it’s always disconcerting to see a project managed within a very large company. Having been through the large company picture once already, I know how wrongly things can go when too many people (especially management types) are involved in a project.

At the same time, though, I’ve always liked Sun, and have high …

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Woke up this morning to the Sun/MySQL news; my initial thought was "uh oh". My big concern is whether Sun will continue to support languages-that-are-not-Java as well as MySQL has been doing.

But my concerns were at least partially laid to rest when MySQL's CEO Marten Mickos explicitly called out their support for lots of different languages (including C#) and said they'll continue to do so in the future. That's good to hear, although as soon as the ink dries on the acquisition, it won't be solely up to Marten to determine how much support Sun provides for a competing technology stack that Scott McNealy once referred to as "a joke". In fairness, that 2003 quote did more to reveal McNealy's own ignorance regarding his competitors' products than anything else, and of course he's no longer calling the shots at Sun on a day-to-day basis. But still.

This is a …

As long-time readers here know, I've been a fan of MySQL for many, many years--so much that I even wrote a book about it. It's a fantastic product that's unmatched in many ways. Over the years, I've had the pleasure of getting to know many of the early folks at MySQL AB, including the Monty and David (co-founders), Marten (CEO), numerous engineers (Brian, Jim, Mark), sales folks (Kerry, Larry), and so on.

So I was very happy to see the announcement this morning that Sun is Buying MySQL AB. Sun is a great company that really gets Open Source and is making some big and very smart bets on it for their future. I think it's a great home for MySQL.

There's some smart thinking going on over …

While writing my thesis paper on open source in the database market I of course quoted Martin, MySQL AB's (ex-)CEO, with replying to Oracle acquisition attempts that MySQL AB "will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL,". Well things did not turn out that way, was instead of an IPO to lay the foundations of this large organization, MySQL AB was instead bought up by SUN. I have mixed feelings about this, but there is definitely one good thing now: People will now no longer have to be confused about MySQL vs. MySQL AB (I always …

"Didn't see that one coming. Their blog contains details to what this could mean for both companies. May as well be one of the most important takeovers of 2008 already!"

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Could this mean that the mysql cluster is finally going to get proper development attention? I don't know but sure as hell hope so. Congratulations to all mysql employees!

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• Must-Know People In The MySQL Field
• MySQL Conference Liveblogging: Performance Guide For MySQL Cluster …

Thanks to those who tried it out and left feedback, much appreciated.

Changes:

• Changed /usr/local/bin/perl to /usr/bin/env perl to make the open source crowd happy.  Make sure the proper perl directory is first in your $PATH    
• Made the usage string contain the valid modes in myq_status
• Added check for mysql binary in MySQL_Script_Utils.pm
• Quoted the --password option in MySQL_Script_Utils.pm to handle passwords with strange characters in them.
• Setup default options string to be clearer which options are available to the scripts (like -? and -d)
• Bumped the minimum repeat time for myq_status down to 1 second.  Note that it still might take more than 1 second for the check to run.

These are the news that left me flabbergasted today. Sun announces an agreement to acquire MySQL for $1bn. I had heard rumors of an IPO and about MySQL going to launch a huge announcement some when this year. But this is much better than what I could ever imagine

Sun has an impressive background in open source development. Systems and applications such as OpenOffice, OpenSolaris or NetBeans, together with the Java programming language, have been developed by Sun. It is also one of the largest IT companies in the world and can bring a very strong global support network. But most importantly, with this move Sun is going to boost MySQL’s credibility in the corporate world, and open source’s credibility by extension.

As Sun’s CEO explains in his …