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 …

One of the things I’ve been working on lately in Kettle / Pentaho Data Integration is the transparency of the performance monitoring.

We don’t just need an API to get the step performance data out, but we also need to visualize this data in a simple way, something like this:

The next steps will be to also allow this data to be spooled off to a database somewhere and to be accessed remotely using Carte.

Until next time,

Matt

 Saw both of these on ComputerWorld:

   Oracle buying BEA

   Sun buying MySQL 

It'll be interesting to see how this changes the landscape.

Jonathan announced that Sun is acquiring MySQL. Of course classic questions will pop up - What about PostgreSQL? Will Sun de-invest in PostgreSQL?, etc. I dont think that any such thing will happen, but choice of databases for OpenSolaris has just become broader to suit  one's  preferences and needs, thanks to Sun.

Sun Microsystems has acquired MySQL for $1 billion in cash and options. That's now old news. The implications of the deal, however, have yet to be felt, but this deal means several key things for open source.

In no particular order:

• Sun is directly competing with Red Hat to become the heart of the open-source business community. I've written before that either Red Hat with its operating system or MySQL with its database could become the center of an alternative ecosystem to the Proprietary Bloc (Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM). With Sun at the helm of MySQL, MySQL just became a lot more credible in this role as it now has cash to match its ambition.
  ...

As Zack reported, Sun is buying MySQL for ~$800M plus $200M in options. Interestingly, the MySQL acquisition represents 8% of Sun's current market cap (~$13 Bil). While I'm happy for the MySQL team, my views on Sun's OSS "strategy" are mixed at best. Let's hope Marten and team can help Sun realize that there is value in software...good software, not the stuff that was 5th in class, and remains so after open sourcing it. Oracle also announced it will acquire BEA for $8.5 Bil, a higher price than Larry rejected a little while back. The deal also represents 8% of... READ MORE

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, talked up MySQL's customer list: Facebook, Google, Digg, etc., but also Toyota, IKEA, Southwest Airlines, Nokia.

"The single biggest impediment to MySQLs growth is their ability to give peace of mind to global companies that want to put MySQL into mission-critical deployments."

Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL [For some reason in Orlando, Florida - was he swimming with dolphins?]:

"Wonderful industry logic underlying this transaction."

"This strengthens our ability to serve our existing customers and to serve our new customers as enterprises migrate over to open-source databases."

Rich Green, EVP, Software, Sun:

...

Apparently, Larry Ellison didn't like the idea of anyone getting more than a few minutes of press for an acquisition. Following on the heels of Sun's acquisition of MySQL, Oracle is announcing that it is buying everyone else on the planet to prevent this from happening again.

No, actually, Oracle has announced that it is buying BEA Systems for $8.5 billion. The proprietary world just got even more consolidated with less choice and higher costs for buyers.

...

A lot is being said about Sun's acquisition of MySQL. I think it is great news. Congratulations to the MySQL folks.

I have a lot of respect for Sun from using their systems for many years. In recent years they have moved in a good direction with respect to open source. Having MySQL under their umbrella is excellent news for them. For MySQL, being tied to Sun seems like a great place to move.

Will be very interesting to see where this goes over the next few years and how MySQL benefits from being part of Sun.