The latest from the MySQL community

As many of you may have already heard, Sun officially announced their purchase of  MySQL today.  After the last few years with Oracle pushing Linux and commodity hardware, Sun has certainly taken the hit.  I guess this is their turn to hit back.

With MySQL 6.0 out, increasingly we find the full compliment of sophisticated database features in MySQL.  But a lot of the devil is in the details.  Where Oracle has had problems with the sheer size of the codebase, and addressing security vulnerabilities, and other bugs in a timely manner, MySQL has the problem of a mature codebase.  Some of these features are newly available, and if my experiences with replication are any indication, often have hidden gotchas and “features” which are not emphasized in the literature.

The next question on my mind is, how does Oracle’s purchase and now …

I’m sure by now you would have read the great news that is Sun Microsystems acquisition of MySQL!

Sun have been forging ahead in the Open Source world with OpenSolaris, an Operating System that scales to Enterprise proportions and is an ideal host for the number one Open Source Database Server that is MySQL.

Whether this will have any impact on the MySQL Linux / FreeBSD / Windows offerings is something I am sure the community will be watching closely, but in my experience Java runs much faster on Solaris as it can take advantage of the …

I have been working for MySQL for about six months now and I have mixed feelings over the big deal with Sun. Looking at the market out there it does seem like financially it is the right move, the market is starting to feel the weight of the housing crisis and many are saying a recession is looming. In my opinion this makes the deal more attractive in financial terms opposed to a possible IPO would have. I guess I am approaching the impact on the consulting group with guarded optimism. We will have a great deal of opportunities moving forward, but they will be different then what we have been doing in the past. My background is from larger organizations, I left those organizations specifically because I no longer enjoyed not being able to take a large enough role to truly shape things ( you simply do not feel like your contributions matter in some organizations ) . I figured with MySQL I would have the opportunity to have a great deal more input on …

Great to see that the MySQL team has been rewarded for the hard work they've done over the years.

Digging through my email archives I've found several email exchanges with Monty from the early periods of PHP and Zend (late 90s) where we had several discussions around best ways to implement hash tables, the growth of our businesses, and the communities. Back then their company was still T.c.X (http://www.tcx.se/) and a very lean operation. In 2000 we finally met in person for the first of many times in Tel-Aviv when Monty and David joined the first PHP developer's meeting.

Since then a lot has been going on. Probably the two most significant changes were the acceptance of open-source software for business critical environments; the second was a realization after the burst of the bubble that the Java/Enterprise database combination was not the only way to build business critical Web …

Part of what makes me very happy about our Sun deal is the interest Sun has expressed in learning from us. That has been evident in all the various meetings here in Orlando — be it with the founders, with the individual departments, or in front of the entire audience.

So as a way to teach Sun a first lesson, I had prepared a gig for the end of the presentations during the morning. We have a tradition of singing songs in our company, stemming from our Scandinavian heritage. “We take this very seriously”, I had heard Rich Green comment. And I’m happy he meant it in a very respectful manner: Corporate culture is important. Drinking songs themselves are meant to be purely fun, and not taken seriously, although they are surrounded by plenty of fairly rigid tradition.

In order to make it light for our future colleagues from Sun, as well as our own recent recruits as well as others unfortunate enough not to know …

If you follow the MySQL world at all, or you just have your eyes open, you have probably noticed that an agreement has been reached for Sun to acquire MySQL AB for about one billion dollars. Quite a few people have asked for my thoughts on the matter, so I will provide them publicly here for all. Overall, I see this as a mostly good thing.

I think that Sun has a very good chance of leading MySQL better than MySQL. At the same time, it’s always disconcerting to see a project managed within a very large company. Having been through the large company picture once already, I know how wrongly things can go when too many people (especially management types) are involved in a project.

At the same time, though, I’ve always liked Sun, and have high …

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Woke up this morning to the Sun/MySQL news; my initial thought was "uh oh". My big concern is whether Sun will continue to support languages-that-are-not-Java as well as MySQL has been doing.

But my concerns were at least partially laid to rest when MySQL's CEO Marten Mickos explicitly called out their support for lots of different languages (including C#) and said they'll continue to do so in the future. That's good to hear, although as soon as the ink dries on the acquisition, it won't be solely up to Marten to determine how much support Sun provides for a competing technology stack that Scott McNealy once referred to as "a joke". In fairness, that 2003 quote did more to reveal McNealy's own ignorance regarding his competitors' products than anything else, and of course he's no longer calling the shots at Sun on a day-to-day basis. But still.

This is a …

As long-time readers here know, I've been a fan of MySQL for many, many years--so much that I even wrote a book about it. It's a fantastic product that's unmatched in many ways. Over the years, I've had the pleasure of getting to know many of the early folks at MySQL AB, including the Monty and David (co-founders), Marten (CEO), numerous engineers (Brian, Jim, Mark), sales folks (Kerry, Larry), and so on.

So I was very happy to see the announcement this morning that Sun is Buying MySQL AB. Sun is a great company that really gets Open Source and is making some big and very smart bets on it for their future. I think it's a great home for MySQL.

There's some smart thinking going on over …

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 …