For this third installment in the Open Source CEO Series, I caught up with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL. Marten is one of my favorite people anywhere, and has been a great addition to the MySQL team. Marten is a fantastic speaker and incredibly adept at turning a phrase ("As if you could kill a dolphin by swallowing the ocean" or, my favorite, "Yes, MySQL will be part of a larger company, and that larger company will be MySQL").

I'm sure Marten has flaws, but I've yet to discover them. He certainly has some great insight, as found below:

Name, position, and company of executive
Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL

Year company was founded and year you joined it
MySQL was founded in 1995, and I joined it in 2001.

Stage of funding and venture firms that have invested
We have done three …

Brian Aker was a recent guest on the LinuxCast podcast with Don Marti. Brian has some interesting thoughts in this podcast and elsewhere on his blog, on motivations for writing Free and/or Open Source software. Here's why I do it myself.

Way back in February I gave a webinar on using our Visual Studio integration product with MySQL.  At the time, our code did not integrate very well with the TableAdapter wizard.  To be precise, you really couldn't use stored procedures with a table adapter at all.  During the broadcast, someone asked me about using stored procedures and I told him that I would blog about it once I got it working.  Well, here we are.

Actually, we've had it working for a couple of weeks now but I'm just now getting to the blog post.  You know how it is.  There were several problems at play here but the biggest issues were the fact that we needed to provide an enumerator object for columns that would be returned by a stored procedure.  The second issue was needing to use the DbProviderSpecificTypeProperty attribute on our provider specific type property on the parameter class.  Let's look at each one of these in more …

MySQL AB today announced that iStockphoto has scaled out with the MySQL Enterprise database to handle its rapid growth while maintaining high performance and high availability. In the past three years, iStockphoto.com has grown from being one of the top 3,000 most-visited global Web sites to one of the top 300, according to Alexa.com. In the United States, it's now one of the 100 most-visited sites.

For the second installment in the Open Source CEO Series, I caught up with Javier Soltero, CEO and Co-founder of Hyperic. Javier is a highly pragmatic open sourceror, fully buying into the open source ethos but not forgetting that customers buy value, not source code.

Name, position, and company of executive
Javier A. Soltero, CEO and Co-founder, Hyperic

Year company was founded and year you joined it
Hyperic was founded in 2004. Coincidentally, I joined that same year. :-)

Stage of funding and venture firms that have invested
Series B (closed 6/07). Investors: Accel Partners & Benchmark Capital

Background prior to current company
I was Chief Architect at Covalent in charge of developing products to help manage Apache and its related technology stack (Tomcat, etc.). We built the first version of what later …

Way back in February I gave a webinar on using our Visual Studio integration product with MySQL.  At the time, our code did not integrate very well with the TableAdapter wizard.  To be precise, you really couldn't use stored procedures with a table adapter at all.  During the broadcast, someone asked me about using stored procedures and I told him that I would blog about it once I got it working.  Well, here we are.

Actually, we've had it working for a couple of weeks now but I'm just now getting to the blog post.  You know how it is.  There were several problems at play here but the biggest issues were the fact that we needed to provide an enumerator object for columns that would be returned by a stored procedure.  The second issue was needing to use the DbProviderSpecificTypeProperty attribute on our provider specific type property on the parameter class.  Let's look at each one of these in more …

OK. First off. I broke the rules. There are actually seven here.

I figure Marten, Jay and Stewart can’t be wrong.

… so here it goes.

* Smarter InnoDB checkpointing. The fuzzy checkpointing seems less than ideal. I think you could just fill up memory with data pool modifications and then checkpoint every 3-5 minutes or so writing the entire DB out to disk in one head pass. You’d be able to fully saturate the disks in this manner. Granted faster is better but our 100MBps drives only see 15-30MBps in practice.

You’d need copy on write semantics though so if you’re seeing full …

I see that Marc Andreesen has been updating his blog:
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html


Some commenters have proposed that Amazon's EC2 service would be a way to easily scale a Facebook app (or a non-Facebook web app). I think EC2 is a great service and have no desire to say anything negative about it. So I will just say two things: it isn't as easy as that, and EC2 is not free either. Bonus points to commenters who want to go into more detail on these topics than I have here!


Its good to see that he updated his blog, but he missed addressing this quote:


The implication is, in my view, quite clear -- the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the …

DISCLAIMER (and yes, it's a long one):
Over the years, I have come to love MySQL. I have many friends, colleagues and peers that depend on MySQL in one way or the other to make their living. Friends whose lives and passions revolve around MySQL. Friends who want to change the world (with MySQL). Friends who want to take MySQL to the next level.

I am so fascinated about MySQL's business that when I first received a call for comments that MySQL is re-launching MySQL Enterprise by dividing the development tree, I felt very happy. I had been a part of various conversations by then debating whether a company should invest in MySQL Enterprise. My view was: if you're a tad bit serious about your business or product, you need MySQL Enterprise. For businesses of all sort, that's an investment, which actually has the potential of lowering TCO (yes, I believe so). I remember saying that, in many ways, branching off the development tree …

Mandriva has answered the call, and pre-announced this statement on Microsoft's patent game:

As far as patent protection is concerned, we are not great fans of software patents which we consider as counter productive. We also believe what we see, and until we see hard evidence from, say, SCO or Microsoft, that there are pieces of codes in our software that infringe existing patents, we will assume that any other announcement is just FUD. So we don't believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft to do our job.

A clear statement, and one that lays down good guidelines for Microsoft: if you want Mandriva to play, you need to provide a compelling reason to do so. Microsoft has not yet done so. Time to put up or shut up.