Matt Asay writes:

Marten Mickos today confirmed with Stephen Shankland @ CNET that Oracle tried to buy MySQL. Not sure when, but it sounds recent (and, I suspect, more than once). It's not surprising that Oracle would make this move, though it surprises me that it wasn't IBM (which is not to say that they haven't tried, too - I haven't asked Marten that) - IBM has a clear strategy of using open source as a "low-end" alternative to its high-end products.

What is most impressive in all this (and just one reason that I think Marten is one of the top CEOs anywhere, and certainly in open source business) is Marten's response to Stephen's question as to why not sell:

EnterpriseDB : Open source based relational database, PostgreSQL based database management software

Oh, that’s right - it’s a proprietary database! “Based on PostgreSQL” - well, good for them - they got a bunch of stuff for free[1]. But without a commitment to having the source out there for every release (or even the development tree) how committed are they really?

How can anybody tell if their improvements are good and well written or just utter hacks that would make you loose your lunch? (not dissing their programmers here, just pointing out that you cannot know).

Meanwhile, over here at MySQL, every single time that a developer types bk commit, an email is sent (with the content of the patch) to a public list[2]. …

Oracle has 50,000 employees. Thats 50,000 people waking up each day to work on Oracle products, and those 50,000 get paid by Oracle each day. We have 50,000 people download our software everyday and work to make it better. But we dont pay them. Which model would you rather have?

A quote from our CEO Marten Mickos in “Oracle’s New Enemy” over at forbes.com.

It is pretty neat to have your work seen by that many people each day.

Marten Mickos today confirmed with Stephen Shankland @ CNET that Oracle tried to buy MySQL. Not sure when, but it sounds recent (and, I suspect, more than once). It's not surprising that Oracle would make this move, though it surprises me that it wasn't IBM (which is not to say that they haven't tried, too - I haven't asked Marten that) - IBM has a clear strategy of using open source as a "low-end" alternative to its high-end products.

What is most impressive in all this (and just one reason that I think Marten is one of the top CEOs anywhere, and certainly in open source business) is Marten's response to Stephen's question as to why not sell:

"We will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL."It's a different riff on the same theme that …

It’s been reported a million times elsewhere, but Oracle has acquired Sleepycat, maker of the BerkeleyDB database. This will probably affect various users of BDB itself, but not MySQL users. If Oracle bought Sleepycat to mess with MySQL, they’re smoking something really good. I don’t think they’re that stupid.

I was quoted by Computer World magazine, in their article Users unworried by Oracle?s purchase of Sleepycat as follows:

Despite its popularity …

Marten Mickos said something last night during the OSBC Executive Town Hall that was both provocative and profound. Asked whether the acquisitions of Sleepycat and InnoDB were a threat to MySQL, Marten suggested that no one can successfully acquire the life out of a successful open source company:

"Trying to kill MySQL by acquiring open source is like trying to kill a dolphin by drinking the ocean."I'm not sure I got it exactly right, but that's about it. His point? Successful communities are not subject to one or two dependencies, people-related or technology-related or otherwise. Successful communities grow, self-heal, and adapt. I agree.

But then, I don't think (and I somewhat doubt if Marten thinks this - he's certainly never said so) that Oracle is attempting to kill MySQL through its acquisitions. Its intentions are elsewhere....Where? I'm not yet 100% sure.

The topic at hand is Oracle buying one dual license open source company after another. This is getting a lot of people worried. Of course it also got me thinking.

Dual licensing is a business model associated with companies distributing their code under two very different licenses. One license is a classic proprietary license. It usually includes all the goodies like warranties and the right to embed the code into own proprietary code without any additional requirements.

However the same code is also provided through some open source license, usually one of the so called reciprocal licenses (GPL and friends). Reciprocal means that these licenses require that any code that is linked with …

I've been thinking about this for the last day or so and have come to the conclusion that Oracle's acquisition of Sleepycat Software (and Berkeley DB) is not about MySQL. Even when combined with their previous purchase of Innobase Oy (and InnoDB), it's not about MySQL.

With all due respect to Phil Windley (and Gadgetopia), you're wrong. Oracle is thinking much bigger and more strategically than "put the squeeze on MySQL."

Trying to put MySQL out of business would be a fairly short-term tactical move. I think Oracle is looking 5 years down the road and seeing what the world looks like as the …

I have had a blog entry waiting to be posted for a while about how bad the manual search has sucked since the versioning was implemented. I love the versioning but not being able to search it has been maddening. That post will never see light. The manual search has been fixed! We now have the best of both worlds. A versioned manual and search that works.
(type this into your browser address bar)

mysql.com/search term

For those of you that might not know this also works on php.net and freshmeat.net.

This error usually pops up at the most unexpected times and places, and usually in an already working client application/website.

Here are a couple of reasons you get this error on the client-side while communicating with MySQL:

1. BLOBs

Another primary cause for this error, is when you update or select tables containing large blobs. By default MySQL's max_allowed_packet is set to 1MB. Should your update-SQL grow larger than this MySQL parameter, MySQL will simply drop the connection. This can easily happen with even a 512MB blob value, as blob values are usually hexed and thus takes two hex values per byte of the blob.

2. Client Timeouts

Most MySQL servers have at least three primary timeout settings for a client connection, connect, read and write timeouts. These control how long your client should wait for a response from the server when it connects, how long your …