The latest from the MySQL community

An important question for MySQLers and MySQL users alike is: “What do the MySQL Founders think of the acquisition of MySQL by Sun?”

Yesterday, I had an opportunity to explore that question further, in my first personal encounter with Sun. Already before that encounter, I had asked Monty a couple of questions.

Kaj: Monty, in the 1990s, you developed MySQL on Solaris. Why was that?

Monty: In the early years when I worked with Sun products, I was always
impressed with the stability and reliability of both hardware and
operating system. That was the reason why we used Sun Microsystems technology to develop MySQL.

Kaj: You did that development ages ago. What do you think about the Sun Microsystems of 2008?

Monty: In recent times, I have been very happy with Sun’s contributions to the Open Source world, for example Open Solaris, Java and Open Office. Also, I am …

Today we read the news that Sun is acquiring MySQL. As MySQL users and customers, it will take a bit more time for us to digest what to think of this, but for MySQL, it's certainly a good achievement, and I want to be among the first to congratulate Monty, Mårten and all other dedicated MySQL folk on this. I hope to hear soon about the sort of development and administration tools Sun is know for to reach also MySQL users, and if that turns out to be the path, then as customers we can happily welcome this event. I welcomed before Sun's open sourcing of Java, another key technology for us, and now we find our primary database solution to be under the same roof.

Update: wow, what a reaction from the stock market today. Sun paid $800M in cash plus …

Like in the past two years, there will be a DotOrg-Pavilion as part of the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 exhibition floor. We've now concluded the invitation process - the following 15 Open Source projects that support MySQL will be present to showcase their work:

• CMS made simple - a fast and easy way to create a web site and manage its contents.
• DbBlender - a project that implements SQL support in Blender to enable remote repository capabilities.
• Entrance - an easy-to use browser for MySQL databases.
• Deki …

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 …

Sun Microsystems announced today that it will be acquiring MySQL for $1 billion. Sometimes the good guys get exactly what they deserve.

At first blush, it seems an odd acquisition for Sun. Sun, after all, is not (or was not) in the database market. But Sun's historical strength in the web economy, and MySQL's current role as the heart of the web, makes it an interesting, important step for Sun to make. Said Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz:

Today's acquisition reaffirms Sun's position at the center of the global Web economy. Supporting our overall growth plan, acquiring MySQL amplifies our investments in the technologies demanded by those driving extreme growth and efficiency, from Internet media titans to the world's largest traditional enterprises. MySQL's employees and culture, along with …

Today we have 400 some MySQL employees gathered in Orlando for our all-company meeting that kicks off separate departmental meetings for Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Services etc. Although we've routinely had all-engineering meetings and sales kickoffs every year, this is the first time in a couple of years we've gathered the entire company.

There's a tradition at these big meetings that there's always some kind of surprise. Could be a boat cruise along the Neckar river, or an offsite eco adventure in the Mexican jungle (food poisoning optional) or a trip to a local sauna.

This year I think we managed to surprise everyone …

It makes sense. Sun didn't have a Database in their platform stack yet.

They have an OS they should abandon, but they have the hardware and they have appservers, however for a database people needed to go shop elsewhere.
Oracle , IBM and Microsoft also have a pretty complete stack
Others still need to fill the gaps.. Interesting times..

Over the past four articles I've demonstrated cases where a denormalized data model is faster than a normalized one, but often not by that much, and a case where a normalized data model was a bit faster than a denormalized one.  My general conclusion was with today's optimizers one should target a normalized data model and then denormalize where it makes sense, even for reporting.  I'm not as much of a fan of the star schema, a heavily denormalized data model popularized by Ralph Kimball, as I used to be.  Star schemas are costly to build and maintain and the the time spent creating them can often be spent better on more productive optimizations, such as the creation of summary tables and better indexing.  I'm not saying the denormalization doesn't make sense in some cases, just that it doesn't make sense in all cases. 

Time on move on to the topic of this article, partitioning. 

There are many good …

This morning we announced that Sun Microsystems has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL. Having spent the last four plus years working on making MySQL into a strong independent company, this is a bit of a change of strategy, but from my perspective it's all for the good. It's no secret that MySQL was planning to go public in the very near future. In fact, many folks have been preparing for us to operate as a publicly held company. And in some respects, what's changing here is that we will bypass our own IPO to be part of an... READ MORE

It says here. Yes, the same Sun that’s spent the last two years building a PostgreSQL support business. Funnily enough, Jonathan Schwartz doesn’t mention PostgreSQL in his announcement blog post. One thing he does mention is that the company plans to introduce new support options for MySQL.

“I’ve asked our team to negotiate an arms’ length commercial transaction, prior to closing, that allows us to provide Global Enterprise Support for MySQL - so that traditional enterprises looking for the same mission critical support they’ve come to expect with proprietary databases can have that peace of mind with …