After all the fuss it appears that MySQL will be remaining open source after all. As Kaj Arno and Monty Widenius report, Marten Mickos announced at CommunityOne that the MySQL Server will stay open source, as well as the forthcoming encryption and compression backup features, which MySQL had considered making available only to paying customers.

“The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans …

Close encounter of the sun Communities in San Francisco.

Josh Berkus and yours truly enjoyng the company friendly environment.

There were free copies of the Linux Journal handed out to attendees outside in the hallways here at CommunityOne and I noticed that they just published this year's Readers' Choice Awards - MySQL was voted as the favourite database by 62.7% of their readers!

MySQL is not only the world's most popular open-source database, it's your favorite as well. Although PostreSGL,
SQLite, Firebird and others registered votes, the competition was not fierce. It doesn't hurt that MySQL runs on more than
20 different platforms.

Thanks a lot to the readers of LinuxJournal, we really appreciate the support!

Just two weeks after having returned from the MySQL Conference, I just arrived safely in San Francisco again. This time to attend the CommunityOne on Monday and the JavaOne conference from Tuesday till Friday, which should keep me occupied for the rest of the week. I look forward to meeting my fellow MySQL team members (Colin, Giuseppe and Jay will be here, too), as well as many new colleagues from Sun! Shoot me an email, if you would like to meet.

(If you want $100, you will have to read the entire blog post. Sorry for the tease, but I did not want folks to miss out on the opportunity to win!)

By now it is no surprise that I won one of the three 2008 MySQL Community Member of the Year awards. And folks may know that I won the same award last year.

One interesting fact you may not know: during the 2006 MySQL Awards Ceremony, where Giuseppe Maxia, Roland Bouman, Markus Popp and …

This article describes how to install the Drupal 6.2 CMS on MySQL 6.0, using the Falcon Storage Engine. The operating system is a default Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" (x86) installation.

I will make a few assumptions here, in order to keep the instructions simple: a fresh OS install, no other MySQL databases or web services are running or have already been installed. Both MySQL and the web server are installed on the same host. You should be able to become root to install packages and to have access to the local file system and the system configuration.

This article will explain how to install and configure Apache/PHP, MySQL 6.0 and …

JFYI, I now placed a PDF of my MySQL Conference talk slides about "Performing MySQL backups using Linux LVM Snapshots" on my MySQL talks page. Enjoy!

I?ve already taken a look at MySQL?s changing business model and the potential business drivers behind the company considering introducing new functionality under to Enterprise customers only. One area that I didn?t dive into was the impact on the company?s development model.

This, in fact, was the focus of Jeremy Cole?s initial take on the news as well as a significant response from Marten Mickos. ?MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise,? explained Jeremy.

?As I?ve discussed before, the …

The conference that many of us just went to is called the MySQL Conference and Expo, but a lot of people don’t call it that. They call it by the name it had in 2006 and earlier: MySQL User’s Conference. In fact, some people say (or blog) that they dislike the new name and they’re going to call it the old name, because [… insert reason here…].

I call it by the new name that some people dislike so much. Why? Because it is a conference and expo, not a user’s conference. There’s no reason to pretend otherwise. The conference is organized and owned by MySQL, not the users. It isn’t a community event. It isn’t about you and me first and foremost. It’s about a company trying to successfully build a business, and other companies paying to be sponsors and show their products in the expo hall. Times have changed.

I’m not saying any of this is bad. Being successful in …

Keith Murphy wrote about the open/closed source debacle and the first comment on that post was:

Monty makes all this money from the Sun acquisition, and pretends to be a free software advocate. How much did he make? How much is he giving back to the MySQL community?

Now, Keith rightfully met this with “grow up”. However, I want to point out that many people in the MySQL employee pool benefited from the sale, not just Monty. I also want to point out that Monty devoted years of his life to developing MySQL long before it was ever profitable.

According to Sun’s press release, “Sun will pay approximately $800 million in cash in exchange for all MySQL stock and …