Archive for the 'MySQL' Category

MySQL licensing redux

Published by
jeremy
at May 8, 2008 in MySQL and Sun. 0 Comments

A follow up to one of the more divisive announcements made at the MySQL Conference. From the 451 Group Blog:

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 were made for a company considering an IPO, but made less sense in the context of Sun, a large company with a whole family of complementary open source software and hardware products,” writes Kaj.

“My hope is that the experiment when it comes to closed source extensions developed by Sun is now ended. As far as I know, there is no existing plans for any closed source extensions to the MySQL server,” adds Monty.

While that seems pretty clear cut, there is still room for a little confusion. Kaj writes: “To financially support MySQL’s free and open source platform, we have a business model which allows both community and commercial add-ons, and we remain committed to it.”

Monty clarifies: “I interpret this, in the context of Mårten’s and Jonathan’s announcements, that we will continue to support and make available commercial addons to the MySQL server from third party, like the Infobright storage engine. Things that we develop ourselves at Sun, at least on the server, will continue to be open source.”

It was always made clear that the decision to ship closed extensions was made before the Sun acquisition. It’s good to see that Sun stepped up, listened to feedback and changed this. It may have made sense for a company looking to IPO, but it doesn’t make sense for Sun. While it’s now clear that Sun-shipped server code will now be open, they also made it clear that 3rd party commercial extensions will continue to be embraced. I see that as a good thing. The “at least on the server” qualifier does leave the door open for something on the MySQL periphery to be closed, but that’s been the case for a few years now (MySQL Monitor for instance). If you’d like to know more about the announcement, Monty has posted his opinion:

I was yesterday attending the “Open Tuesday” Sun & MySQL event. One of the first questions I got from the audience during my questions & answer session was what is my take of the recent MySQL proposition of having closed source parts/modules in the server.

I was very happy to be able to say that Mårten some hours earlier had announced on CommuntyOne that the MySQL server is and is always going to be open source.

It’s very good to see that Mårten is continuing to be responsive to the MySQL community and to the MySQL customers. Thanks to Mårten for doing the right thing! Thanks to the MySQL community for expressing their opinions!

Monty also posted a very good (and honest) assesment of the MySQL Conference here.

–jeremy

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MySQL Expo - Day 2

Published by
jeremy
at April 16, 2008 in MySQL. 0 Comments

Day 2 of the MySQL Conference and Expo is well under way. The opening keynote started with Rick Falkvinge, whose Swedish Pirate Party seems to be making quite a bit of progress since the last time I saw him speak at OSCON. The history he presented on copyright was interesting, I suggest you check it out once the slides are posted. Next up was Scaling MySQL - up or out, a panel that included participants from MySQL, Sun, Flickr, Fotolog, Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube (Google is still quite secretive about many numbers-related items it seems). Good coverage of the numbers presented (Colin was plogging, so that document should be released soon and the video should be available on YouTube as well). It was interesting to get some different perspectives from multiple larger companies that are doing things much differently in some cases.

The tracks I attended today included MySQL Sandbox, Falcon, Maria, scaling and frameworks. The different fundamental design approaches Maria and Falcon are taking, combined with the internal competition that was created by having multiple internal engines should be beneficial for everyone. MySQL 6+ looks compelling and will certainly be a step up in many ways, not only from a transactional perspective. I wanted to look into federation and partitioning further, and the talks at the conference should be the motivation I needed.

I’m actually flying out tonight, which is a shame as a couple really great talks are tomorrow. Hopefully slides will be posted, but I don’t think they’re doing audio or video for anything expect the keynotes. I thought that would be standard for all conferences by now.

–jeremy

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MySQL Expo - Day 1

Published by
jeremy
at April 15, 2008 in MySQL. 1 Comment

(As with most of my conference posts, this is a bit more stream of consciousness and a bit less proofread than is typical. Such is the result of posting during small coffee breaks.)

With the recent Sun acquisition of MySQL, I expected quite a bit out of the MySQL Conference and Expo this year. With a record setting 2,000+ attendees, it looks like I wasn’t alone. Marten kicked things off this morning (The 8:30 start was a snap back to reality after the 10:45-11 start of LRL) explaining a bit about the acquisition, including the fact that he felt Sun and MySQL AB had an “alignment of culture and vision”. Marten is always both entertaining and forthcoming, so the comment he joking made about now having a bunch of Sun PR reps and lawyers listening to what he said was quite apropos. He did not cover the recent announcement that moving forward some feature will only be available in MySQL Enterprise. I’m sure I’ll cover more on that later, but it looks like more and more companies are moving toward what is usually called the RHEL/Fedora model…and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’d be curious if this change was already in the pipeline or if it was a result of the Sun acquisition (if I had to guess, it would be on the former). Another interesting fact I picked up, is that all Sun database initiatives are now under Marten. This includes Postgresql.

Next up was Jonathan Schwartz. He has an extremely good sense of humor, especially for a CEO of such a large company. He opened with a comment like “OK, enough of this Open Source stuff”. He briefly covered some of the conspiracy theories around why Sun made the acquisition, but the real reasoning he cited looks sound to me. He commented on a recent trip to the Texas Advanced Computing Center, which among other items houses the 62,976 CPU core Ranger Sun Constellation Cluster. There is not a single piece of proprietary software in the entire stack. When Jonathan asked one of the researchers if any proprietary software remained in the supercomputing space, he couldn’t think of a single instance. As Jonathan pointed out, the Constellation Cluster (which consists of Sun hardware) didn’t come cheap. Contrary to the comment I heard at LRL, he also alluded to the fact that a GPL version of ZFS may not be far off. He also mentioned the possibility of Sun doing something in the mobile space. It’s clear mobile is going to be a hot topic for the near future. Also interesting to me, he mentioned a single Linux distribution by name. It was CentOS.

Last up in the morning was Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. He explained some of the history of Amazon, including the origin of obidos in the URL and a screenshot of the very first version of the site. He covered the technology progression that lead Amazon to release AWS and noted the absolute importance of incremental scalability. Amazon really is doing some cool stuff.

The rest of the sessions I attended have been interesting, with topics including memcached, PDO, performance and replication. “The future of MySQL” covered what we can expect out of 5.1, 6.0 and 6.x. 5.1 definitely contains some items that will be useful to LQ and the new storage engines in 6.0 (Maria and Falcon) should be beneficial to everyone. There seems to be a tacit distancing from Innodb, but that really comes as no surprise. The MySQL monitoring piece that’s part of MySQL Enterprise looks quite good. I’ll have to see if I can get my hands on it. EC2 and SOA will likely round out the rest of my sessions for the day. I think I’m off to the Exhibit Hall Reception and Mindtouch party after that. If you’ll be attending either, see you there. More to come tomorrow.

–jeremy

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Gratis 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo Conference Pass

Published by
jeremy
at March 11, 2008 in Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, MySQL and Open Source. 1 Comment

I recently mentioned that LQ will be sponsoring a number of upcoming Linux and Open Source related conferences. I’m extremely happy to report that we are now able to give away a completely free conference pass to some of them. The first one is the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo, which is a $1,199.00 value. To be eligible, simply post in this thread explaining how you work with MySQL or how you’re involved in the MySQL community along with why you’d like to attend the event. We’ll randomly select a winner from the eligible entries. We only have a single pass to give away, so please make sure you are able to attend the event before entering. Thanks, and good luck.

Note: We also have some gratis LugRadio Live USA 2008 tickets available. See my previous post if you’re interested.

–jeremy

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What Makes a Freedom Fighter Join a Giant? or Ten Reasons to Get Acquired

Published by
jeremy
at February 17, 2008 in MySQL, Open Source and Sun. 0 Comments

An interesting inside look on what went into the MySQL end of the acquisition decision from Mårten Mickos has recently been posted.

At MySQL there were few things we loved as much as the thought of being our own masters. We had always been contrarians and we prided ourselves with not following what we saw as outdated ideas from big companies. We made the dolphin on our logo jump surprisingly from right to left (as opposed to the typical left to right) - because we wanted it to be clear: we were not afraid to be different. We decided that people can work from home so we can hire the best and brightest anywhere in the world – not just Stockholm, Seattle or Silicon Valley. We cherished heated debates in the company – and there were many. When other companies dictated alignment, we celebrated dissonance and accepted that there could be multiple viewpoints. When others gathered their staff at a prestigious hotel somewhere in the USA, we summoned our engineers to a primitive sanatorium outside St. Petersburg, Russia. We did it our way. At times it was difficult –even chaotic, but we loved it even more for that reason. It created a passion and strength inside the company.

So why did we change our minds in a few short weeks? What made us think that Sun Microsystems would be a good home for us? What made this better than an IPO? Why did we abandon our revolution for a stable nation? What was it in Sun Microsystems that attracted us? And, most importantly, will we be able to maintain the passion that has driven us to where we are today?

Let me start in a typical Scandinavian contrarian way: Perhaps we will be unable to maintain our passion within Sun. And at the most extreme, perhaps we should not have done this deal. The reality is it will take many years before we can judge this decision to know if it was the right course.

But let me also state that there is probably no better place for this “dirty dozen” (or perhaps “fanatical four hundred”) of MySQL than inside Sun Microsystems.

I’ve always really liked and had a huge amount of respect for both Mårten and the MySQL founders. They built a great company and a great product, and have been open and transparent the entire time. How this acquisition pans out has huge implications for Open Source IMHO. MySQL AB was on target to become one of the largest pure play Open Source companies in the world. With more and more Open Source companies being scooped up by traditional players and consolidators, it remains unclear to me how many pure play Open Source companies we’ll see in 5+ years. I think the ramifications of that are still not well understood (or given enough attention for that matter). Only time will tell.

–jeremy

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Sun acquires MySQL II

Published by
jeremy
at January 17, 2008 in MySQL, Open Source and Sun. 5 Comments

A quick follow up to a previous post. The buzz created by the Sun acquisition announcement is still going strong. I’m still digesting the news and doing additional reading, but here are some interesting items I’ve run across.

Other Open Source database participants have been quite positive about the news. Josh Berkus, a member of the PostgreSQL Core Team and a Sun employee, was quick to welcome Brian Aker and the MySQL team aboard. You can see comments from Andy Astor, of EnterpriseDB here. This is friendlier stuff then you typically see in the proprietary world. I think that’s a function of both Open Source being different and us still being quite early on the adoption curve (where a rising tide is seen as lifting all boats).

From Matt: Guess how long the entire process, beginning to end, took? Five weeks. From the first phone call to today’s announcement, the deal took five weeks. That time frame is absolutely astounding. With a company the size of Sun, getting a simple partnership deal done usually takes more than five weeks. To have an acquisition of this size pulled off (Sun spent about 36% of its cash on the deal) is a testament to how bad they wanted a deal done.

Here’s a quick comparison to the BEA deal by Savio:
First off, kudos to Sun for valuing MySQL at this price. The deal represents ~36% of Sun’s Cash & Cash Equivalents (of $2.7B) on hand at the end of their last quarter (Sept. 2007). But considering how cheap debt is these days, Sun could probably fund a portion of the deal through cheap debt.

A reader commented on BEA and MySQL being founded in the same year, but BEA being sold for 8x more than MySQL. True, but BEA has ~$1.5B in revenue versus ~$60M for MySQL. When you take revenue into account, MySQL secured 3x more in acquisition price for every dollar of revenue than did BEA. OSS vendors must be sleeping with dollar signs in their eyes tonight….

Here’s a Q&A with Stephen O’Grady:
Q: So does that make this “We’re the Dot in the Dot Com,” the sequel? With the commensurate crash to follow?
A: Some would contend that’s the case, yes. Particularly a couple of members of the media we’ve spoken with. And of course it is possible that the model propping up Google’s immense valuation and those similar to it will prove to be similarly illusory. But somehow I doubt it. The fact is that the Google’s of the world have made real what Sun itself could not: a network that is, in fact, the computer. And the Google’s of the world, far more often than not, run on MySQL. Via this single acquisition, Sun’s made itself a relevant vendor in a space that very few, if any, of the larger commercial systems suppliers can play in.

Whether you agree with the valuation or not, YouTube sold for $1.6 billion, and consumed virtually no software from any of the major vendors. If that acquisition was to take place today, they would have been buying from Sun.

Not everyone is seeing this as a positive. Jay worries about the large company syndrome and Ben wishes Sun would focus on their core. Sun’s poor history with acquisitions seems to come up a lot, but none of those were under Schwartz.

Some additional comments:

* The MySQL founders are happy with the deal. That’s a good thing.
* Who this impacts and who else could have pulled off an acquisition seem to be popular questions. I’d say the latter is a fairly small list: Oracle, Red Hat, IBM and maybe Google or Yahoo. Who it impacts remains to be seen, but I think the implications will be pretty far reaching.
* The possibly Google/Yahoo above brings me to an angle that I haven’t seen much commentary on. I’d expect Sun to offer some kind of “MySQL in the cloud” service that could be one component in a service offering that competes with Amazon an its S3/EC2/SimpleDB offerings.
* It’s clear that Sun has made a significant investment in the M from LAMP here. I continue to question how they feel about the L in LAMP though. This seems to be one of the biggest sticking points people have. Will MySQL focus less on Linux (which leads both MySQL sales and downloads by far, from what I understand) and more on Solaris? Will Sun push Solaris while selling MySQL? More questions than answers on this one, so we’ll have to wait and see.
* I’d expect a couple long time MySQL employees to cash out after this and quickly found some very interesting startups based on what they did at MySQL AB.

That’s all for now.

–jeremy

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Red Hat: BofA Downgrades; Cites Troubles With JBoss

Published by
jeremy
at December 17, 2007 in Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, Novell, Open Source and Red Hat. 0 Comments

(via Matt) Following news that Novell may be building momentum comes news that Bank of America has downgraded RHT. As is often the case with stock analysts, more are piling on the downgrade now. From Barrons:

Red Hat (RHT) shares are lower today after Bank of America analyst Kirk Materne cut his rating on the stock to Neutral from Buy. His price target goes to $21 from $23.

Materne says the company’s fiscal third quarter ended November should be “solid,” but that its JBoss application server software “continues to have trouble gaining momentum.” He adds that there are “few catalysts on the horizon” that could add to current billings and cash flow growth estimates for the fiscal year ending in February 2008, or for that matter, FY 2009.

Meanwhile, Trip Chowdhry, of Global Equities Research, also downgraded the stock today, moving to Equal Weight. Chowdhry contends that the company’s business fundamentals are “deteriorating,” and that the JBos acquisition “is a complete failure.”

Chowdrhy also asserts that Red Hat Linux “is gradually being relegated to a position of non-criticality.” He also says Red Hat is losing momentum in the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - to Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL). And he says hardware vendors IBM and Hewlett-Packard are providing support and bug fixes for Red Hat Linux since “vendors feel Red Hat support is not enterprise class.”

Not least, he says that developer momentum is shifting away from the Open Source LAMP software stack - Linux, Apache, My SQL, PHP - and toward Microsoft’s .Net platform.

It’s true that Red Hat is having a little more difficulty than it anticipated integrating JBoss. When you acquire an Open Source company, much of what you are acquiring is the people. Many of the top JBoss people have left. The cultures were different, the sales models were different and I’d guess given the information Red Hat has now, they’d have done things a little bit differently. Hindsight is always 20/20 and I think the long term benefits for Red Hat and JBoss are still there.

Moving on to the Global Equities Research comments, I have no idea where Trip is getting his information. All other leading indicators I’ve seen indicate that Linux and Open Source are doing quite well in BRIC and other emerging markets (and in many of those markets Microsoft is either having difficulty gaining traction or is gaining traction by discounting heavily). Additionally, more and more companies are clearly choosing Linux for absolute mission critical applications. The NYSE is a recent example of this. Finally, LAMP adoption in general has been seeing very strong growth and MySQL AB still seems headed toward its IPO, despite the weakening US economy. It just goes to show that an “analyst” can say just about anything they want, typically with little to no justification or real repercussions.

–jeremy

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Refining MySQL Community Server

Published by
jeremy
at August 11, 2007 in MySQL and Open Source. 0 Comments

MySQL AB has announced some changes in the way it handles the Community and Enterprise releases of MySQL. From the post:

The changes are in the areas of release policy and stability of MySQL Community Server and in the availability of MySQL Enterprise Server.

The changes start from the question: “How can we better target MySQL Community Server to the community and MySQL Enterprise Server to the paying customers?“. Many of them originate from our ongoing discussions with the Linux Distributions, some of whom have been distributing MySQL Enterprise Server to their user base, since MySQL Community Server hasn’t conformed to their needs of feature stability and release schedule.

Our intention is for MySQL Community Server to be very good, and for MySQL Enterprise Server to provide further value on top of that. The five changes, in short, are:

1. New features and community contributions will go into the next development tree. The new features will not be applied to a current GA release, ensuring stability for the Community Server. At the time of writing, the development tree is MySQL 5.2.
2. There will be at least two yearly “mature GA” (currently MySQL 5.0) binary builds. They aren’t scheduled, but usually triggered by grave security vulnerabilities.
3. When a version of MySQL initially goes GA (as 5.1 soon will), the company will release binary builds of the new GA product every month for a period of several months until it reaches a point of suitable stability/maturity to be considered a “mature GA” release — as described above.
4. There will be four yearly “mature GA” (currently MySQL 5.0) source releases, predictably scheduled, to be released once every quarter. These will be ideal for use by distributions shipping MySQL.
5. The current Enterprise source tarballs will be removed from ftp.mysql.com. These will move to enterprise.mysql.com, and will be available for our paying subscribers only.

This has sparked quite a few responses in the community, most of them negative. For one, it’s an extremely confusing setup that builds on what was already a confusing system. Second, it appears to go against what they are attempting to accomplish. Why would supposedly stable “Enterprise” builds be released more often and be tested by less people?

To me, that’s not the worst of it however. At least on the face of it, it seems like a bad business decision. Let me make one thing clear: I really like both MySQL the product and MySQL AB the company. They have done a ton for Open Source and I’d like nothing more than to see them make boat loads of money. The way I see it though, their adoption process is usually something along the lines of: technical person installs MySQL, something critical ends up getting implemented using it, managers insist on a support contract. Maybe what I’ve seen it not representative of the average MySQL sale, but if it is this move should prove quite bad for the bottom line. By making the Enterprise product harder to implement, it makes a support contract less likely in my mind. I thought they were trying to sell on value adds, such as support and monitoring. Is it possible that isn’t working and they are seeking other alternatives? If so, that’s worrisome. I trust that MySQL AB is watching the responses on this closely and really think in the end they’ll do the right thing, but I have to admit this is a little troubling. It’s a trend I’ve seen at a broader scale bubbling beneath the scenes and some interesting times could be ahead for “Enterprise Open Source”.

–jeremy

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OSCON Executive Briefing II

Published by
jeremy
at July 24, 2007 in Linux, Linux Foundation, MySQL, OSCON, Open Source, Ubuntu and maemo. 0 Comments

(live blogging, so forgive the grammar and lack of proof reading)

Always Better

Matt Asay (Alfresco) and Mike Olson (Oracle via SleepyCat) discuss the value of source code. Mike argues that zero cost frictionless distribution is more disruptive than source access. A response from the crowd asked why he doesn’t close BerkleyDB. He didn’t get a chance to answer the question, but did give Matt a book.

The Path to IPO

Marten Mickos discusses how he hopes to grow MySQL AB to a billion in revenues. He covered how much the company has matured in the last few years (including items like: “we now invoice customers and have prices”). MySQL really aligns with PHP, but is “promiscuous when it comes to programming languages”. “Moore’s law will continues, but doesn’t apply to people” - MM. “The company you keep matters in Open Source” - TO. MySQL data seems to once again confirm that many people test OSS on Windows and deploy on Linux. Open Source will accelerate what is already happening to a product - bad ones will die quicker and good ones will get better faster.

Managing Linus Torvalds and other small challenges

Jim is covering the reasons that FSG and OSDL merged. He is also reflecting on what he sees as the future responsibility of the Linux Foundation, including what directions they should take and what pitfalls they should avoid.

Why Free Software values work for business

Mark discusses the relationship between the commercial Canonical and the non-commercial Ubuntu community. Mark sees collaboration as one of the key Open Source strengths. Launchpad is meant to take advantage of this and leverage collaboration as much as possible. Freedom of data is becoming increasingly important and Ubuntu/Canonical is committed to free data not only in launchpad (which will be Open Sourced soon), but throughout the project/company. “Driver support in Linux is probably one of the biggest reservations in Linux adoption” - MS. The following question was asked: “Can Ubuntu become bigger than Mark”. In essence, if Mark went away for whatever reason, would Ubuntu survive? This is clearly a question Mark has really thought about, up to and including Will provisions meant to ensure financial viability for the project.

–jeremy

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MySQL AB and IBM Announce Open Source Database Support for the IBM System i Platform

Published by
jeremy
at May 2, 2007 in IBM, MySQL and Open Source. 0 Comments

Some pretty big news from IBM and MySQL AB at the recent MySQL Conference & Expo 2007 (which I unfortunately had to miss this year, but do plan on attending next year). From the press release:

MySQL AB and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a joint technology and reseller agreement to bring support for the MySQL open source database to the IBM System i business computing platform.

The two companies will work together to offer the MySQL Server for i5/OS, the flagship operating system for System i, and plan to deliver DB2 for i5/OS as a certified MySQL storage engine on the System i platform. This will allow System i customers to implement online and transactional MySQL applications while storing all data in a single, easy-to-manage DB2 database.

In addition, MySQL Enterprise subscriptions — a comprehensive offering of MySQL database software, services and support — will be made available to IBM clients worldwide through IBM’s reseller network and System i sales team. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

For such a large company, IBM has been able to leverage Open Source extremely well. This release is great news for MySQL AB and their upcoming IPO. The reach of the IBM reseller network is absolutely massive and will surely get MySQL into places it’s not currently. The fact that is being implemented as a MySQL storage engine is a testament to how powerful that modular paradigm is. Congrats to both IBM and MySQL AB.

–jeremy

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