As many of you know I am not very fond of the entire CLA idea. However as of late there have been some incorrect assertions around the entire CLA proposal, which I want to correct before people waste more time on the wrong arguments against the CLA proposal. I will have some better arguments against it at the end of this blog post.

It has been unclear to people if the only companies that were approached were big vendors like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft with MySQL AB tacked on. I know that PostgreSQL was asked from the very beginning. While they did not have someone to step up at the beginning of discussions, they did have someone join the discussion later on. Also for all I hear SQLite was also asked. However Richard did not have time to join the debates, which so far have been mainly about legal topics anyways. Now I dont know if Firebird was …

The following is essentially a repost of what I send to the PDO list. However I felt that since I have discussed this topic extensively on my blog before, I should also put this on my blog. Also it might be a slightly calmer reply than what others have posted. Finally after weeks of waiting we now have a proposal on the table of how the likes of IBM, Oracle and Microsoft feel that they could become code contributors to PDO. I agree we should see this as an opportunity. Getting new people on board is always a good thing (tm). I have read through …

I commented on Jonathan Schwartz's blog on his "Helping Dolphins Fly" post. I was not surprised to find that the blog is moderated. I mean its well worth the manual time to keep the blog of your head honcho clean. I don't remember what I said exactly, but I did voice some concerns about the fact that I have not really seen participate much in the scripting world. Suffice it to say my post was never published. It seems I never have anything nice to say about big cooperations. So I want to try something new for a change: Saying something nice about big cooperations.

First up is MySQL err .. SUN. Since they got scooped up they qualify as a big cooperation (of course). I have really appreciated the bulk of the work that MySQL AB …

Now with MySQL AB having been scooped up (as noted by 99% of the blogosphere including myself), what about SAP and open source? IIRC SAP was one of the investors into MySQL AB (not sure how large a chunk they held). SAP really put a lot of weight behind MySQL when they handed over SAP DB (renamed to MaxDB) to MySQL and made it clear that they expect MySQL to be SAP certified any day now (has this happened?).

At the same time SAP has been sending "mixed messages" at best in regards to OSS. And they …

In a vortex. That's the only way to describe the past thirty days, during which we closed out our second quarter, and put together the transaction to acquire MySQL. How'd it all start?

"That'll never happen, I've been trying for years." That's what I told Rich Green (EVP, Software at Sun) about six months ago in response to his assertion, "if there were one company I'd love to acquire, it'd be MySQL. They're an amazing company." Why'd I say it was impossible?

For nearly five years, I've been getting together for dinner with Marten Mickos, MySQL's CEO, catching up on the industry, chatting about trends and business models, and just as the dessert was about to be served... I'd say, "geez, we have so much in common, Marten, we …

Here’s something I wrote up a while back for basic MySQL knowledge. MySQL Competency

This is also a useful list of interview questions for potential hires. DBA Interview Questions

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 …

We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we're acquiring MySQL AB.

If you're interested in the financial details for the quarter, tune in to our conference call (see details on sun.com) today - we'll obviously have more to say as we release our formal results on January 24th.

But the biggest news of the day is... we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you're an industry insider, you'll know what that means - we're acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world's most popular open source database.

You'll recall I wrote about a customer event a few weeks ago, at which some of the …

Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

All that has changed. OSDBs now boast the necessary features and robustness to support commercial databases hundreds of Gigabytes in size. And a growing trickle of competitive benchmark results shows them …

Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

All that has changed. OSDBs now boast the necessary features and robustness to support commercial databases hundreds of Gigabytes in size. And a growing trickle of competitive benchmark results shows them …