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 …

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.