Today we have 400 some MySQL employees gathered in Orlando for our all-company meeting that kicks off separate departmental meetings for Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Services etc. Although we've routinely had all-engineering meetings and sales kickoffs every year, this is the first time in a couple of years we've gathered the entire company.

There's a tradition at these big meetings that there's always some kind of surprise. Could be a boat cruise along the Neckar river, or an offsite eco adventure in the Mexican jungle (food poisoning optional) or a trip to a local sauna.

This year I think we managed to surprise everyone …

It makes sense. Sun didn't have a Database in their platform stack yet.

They have an OS they should abandon, but they have the hardware and they have appservers, however for a database people needed to go shop elsewhere.
Oracle , IBM and Microsoft also have a pretty complete stack
Others still need to fill the gaps.. Interesting times..

Over the past four articles I've demonstrated cases where a denormalized data model is faster than a normalized one, but often not by that much, and a case where a normalized data model was a bit faster than a denormalized one.  My general conclusion was with today's optimizers one should target a normalized data model and then denormalize where it makes sense, even for reporting.  I'm not as much of a fan of the star schema, a heavily denormalized data model popularized by Ralph Kimball, as I used to be.  Star schemas are costly to build and maintain and the the time spent creating them can often be spent better on more productive optimizations, such as the creation of summary tables and better indexing.  I'm not saying the denormalization doesn't make sense in some cases, just that it doesn't make sense in all cases. 

Time on move on to the topic of this article, partitioning. 

There are many good …

This morning we announced that Sun Microsystems has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL. Having spent the last four plus years working on making MySQL into a strong independent company, this is a bit of a change of strategy, but from my perspective it's all for the good. It's no secret that MySQL was planning to go public in the very near future. In fact, many folks have been preparing for us to operate as a publicly held company. And in some respects, what's changing here is that we will bypass our own IPO to be part of an... READ MORE

It says here. Yes, the same Sun that’s spent the last two years building a PostgreSQL support business. Funnily enough, Jonathan Schwartz doesn’t mention PostgreSQL in his announcement blog post. One thing he does mention is that the company plans to introduce new support options for MySQL.

“I’ve asked our team to negotiate an arms’ length commercial transaction, prior to closing, that allows us to provide Global Enterprise Support for MySQL - so that traditional enterprises looking for the same mission critical support they’ve come to expect with proprietary databases can have that peace of mind with …

From Kaj's blog:
http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/sun-acquires-mysql.html/


...and yes it is true that the first UNIX Workstation I bought was a Sun 1. It had color, the NeXT did not (at the time)...

SUN Microsystems just bought MySQL, see the announcement at http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-01/sunflash.20080116.1.xml Now, MySQL isn’t going away any time soon; there are just way too many people that use it. And while Postgres is not actually owned by SUN, they do employ some great folks to develop on it, and those folks are the the “known” Postgres [...]

We are all extremely excited about the possibilities; both for developers and for deployers. We will keep you posted of developments as they happen. Fun times …

I've learned that Sun bought MySQL.

I have no idea right now how money I just made, given that my hiring options are priced in Swedish currency, and I don't know what (minute) percentage of the company they are.

This explains why the company was spending no time or effort at all fixing brokenness in our internal business processes. Why spend the time fixing our internal expense reporting flow, when we're just going to throw it away and use Suns.

This is certainly the end of BitKeeper here. Sun has converted over to Mercurial. And the BK license is biblically first commandment jealous about it's competators. Whether this means BZR or HG for MySQL, I don't know.

This morning, Sun Microsystems announced plans to acquire MySQL AB.

After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.

Being part of the group planning this announcement for the last few weeks, I have had the fortune to contemplate the …