News about the open source database MySQL

 Will MySQL keep lighting up LAMP?, Apr 17, 2008

Some of the Linux developers' and business customers' jitters may have been settled on April 15th when, at the MySQL Conference in San Francisco, Sun announced the next version of MySQL: MySQL 5.1. This edition, which is now available as a release candidate, is still under the Linux-friendly GPLv2.

Linux Warehouse has been appointed as official local distributor for the popular MySQL database in Southern Africa.

Dave Rosenberg once wrote that the winner in a given open-source category (ERP, CRM, etc.) takes all. There's no room for second place. The first mover to get critical mass tends to horde the community and media resources.

With Sun Microsystems announcing earlier this month that it had acquired the most popular open source database company, MySQL, there has been speculation aplenty, some of it grossly misinformed, on just how much change this will mean for staff at the small Swedish company.

It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.

Most analysts agree it all depends on what Sun does with MySQL, the leading open-source database management system.

MySQL AB has released a beta of the latest version of its MySQL Connector/ODBC that features performance enhancements and Unicode support.

Mårten Mickos is living proof that you can take 12 years to graduate from college with an esoteric degree (technical physics) and still become a CEO. Not that he was slacking:

"If you won't work with MySQL, PHP and Ruby, then you are lost," said Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL.

Google long has been known to be a user of the open-source MySQL database software, but the search powerhouse this week published its own changes to the project.

MySQL, purveyor of the open-source database of the same name, is on the road to becoming a publicly traded company, bolstered by $50 million in revenue in 2006.

What makes an enterprise-class database? Redundancy and failover capabilities are just two important features that MySQL expert Scott Noyes names. Noyes also tackles the issue of who's faster: PostgreSQL or MySQL. Along the way, he gives some advice for users working with Sybase and MySQL.

The VAR Guy was half-right. He figured MySQL would launch a partner program during this week’s big customer and developer conference in Santa Clara. He also expected the open source database provider to announce plans for an IPO later this year. Alas, Wall Street may have to wait a little longer.

In October, Oracle sent Red Hat’s stock plummeting on the announcement that it would offer cut-rate support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, under the “Unbreakable Linux” brand. Could Larry Ellison now be planning a repeat with “Unbreakable MySQL”?

Open source database vendor MySQL AB is preparing itself for an initial public offering, and could even be ready to go public before the end of the year, according to its CEO Marten Mickos.

Debian users who depend on MySQL for support need have no worries.

What's the link between eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, often regarded as the father of modern economics, and the open-source software movement? According to Marten Mickos, the chief executive officer of open-source database company MySQL, it's Smith's concept of an "invisible hand," which guides individuals pursuing their own betterment to achieve goals that also benefit society at large.

Marten Mickos joined MySQL AB as CEO in 2001. Under his leadership, the company has grown from a startup to the second largest open source company and the fastest-growing database vendor in the world. Prior to MySQL, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He holds a masters of science in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology.

Without Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP many Web 2.0 companies would not exist today. This is according to Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media and the person most often credited for coining the term Web 2.0. O'Reilly was quoted saying this in a recent media release by MySQL AB, developers of the popular open source database.

Two of the Most Widely Used Applications on Linux Will Achieve Application Portability and Be Represented on the LSB Steering Committee

MySQL, the open source database firm, is to receive Microsoft marketing support along with Visual Studio technical integration.

As the world of software consolidates and open-source programs become more popular, some observers think MySQL is the company most likely to be acquired by a software giant.

Despite having a strong feature set and excellent performance and stability, PostgreSQL lags significantly behind MySQL in one key area: Many more open source projects support MySQL than PostgreSQL.

Business intelligence software maker Business Objects SA continues to keep an eye on developments in the open source world after expanding an existing partnership with Swedish open source database firm MySQL AB.

MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today announced the general availability of MySQL 5.0, the most significant product upgrade in the company's ten-year history.

Our corporate mission is "To make superior database management available and affordable to all." We believe that porting a GPL version of MySQL for the SCO OpenServer platform gives thousands of users more options when it comes to choosing a database -- which is a good thing. The deal produces revenue for us and this allows us to hire more open source developers.

Marten Mickos, chief executive of MySQL, got a phone call last Friday with surprising news: Oracle was buying Innobase, a small Finnish company with close ties to his open-source database company.

It’s been a rough week for Marten Mickos, the chief executive of open source database maker MySQL AB.

Many believe that the InnoDB storage engine is at the heart of what makes the upcoming MySQL 5.0 database tick. The question now is, will Oracle twist that knife?

I had an opportunity to do an email interview with MySQL AB's CEO Marten Mickos this afternoon, and I learned some interesting things. I tried to ask the questions I thought you would want someone to ask, based on reading your comments and email. What stood out to me in his answers was the following:

A looming deadline following a dispute between two prominent open-source developers has forced database vendor MySQL AB to consider changing how it develops its software, and it will also force scores of other open-source projects to consider a similar move within the month.

MySQL AB has released the first beta version of a major upgrade to its open-source database, adding several features designed for corporate users.

Open-source software company MySQL has revamped its pricing and licensing practices in an effort to make its database more attractive to corporate customers.

A source-code analysis of the MySQL database, a popular open-source program at the heart of many Web sites, revealed few bugs compared with the number found in commercial code, testing company Coverity said Friday.

Database developers are favouring Firebird and MySQL over PostgreSQL, according to new research

2004 was a portent of things to come for Linux in 2005, both because of what didn't happen (SCO Group's victory) and what did (the rise of open source software), according to Marten Mickos, CEO of Sweden-based MySQL AB.

MySQL AB is offering consulting packages and GUI tools for those who want to jump into open-source technology but lack in-house gurus and are too nervous to go it alone.

Zack Urlocker, vice president of marketing at MySQL AB, recently talked about what MySQL accomplished in 2004, its plans for 2005 and why he believes companies will choose open source as their New Year's resolution.

MySQL announced the general availability of a set of graphical query and administration tools for its popular MySQL open source database.

MySQL on Wednesday announced general availability of Version 4.1 of its MySQL open source database, which the company is positioning as production-ready for large-scale enterprise usage.

They are curious about the growing number of open source database products on the market, but some SQL Server DBAs say they remain doubtful that companies will adopt it for the long haul.

Users of the open-source MySQL database could be at risk from remote attacks from a bug in phpMyAdmin, the web-based MySQL administration tool.

The next release of the MySQL database will include a Windows installer based on an open-source toolset released by Microsoft earlier this year.

MySQL has created a version of its popular open-source database software for Linux on IBM's Power processors, the company said on Tuesday.

Open source database vendor MySQL AB is floating a new license exception among members of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community in a bid to permit bundling of MySQL alongside PHP.

In the view of at least one prominent member of the community though, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), backer of the GPL license that is at the root of the controversy, really doesn't represent the needs or opinion of the core base of PHP, the popular open source scripting language.

The move comes after MySQL recently issued an incremental release (version 4.0.20), and a change in license from the less restrictive LGPL, or "Lesser" General Public License, to the GPL in some of its included software libraries.

Open source databases have a bright outlook in low-end, Unix-friendly vertical markets, including telecommunications and retail. They have grown from niche use to widespread utilization, and while challenges remain, database deployment is emerging as more of a force for the growth and use of open source and Linux software, according to analysts and vendors.

Wayne Kernochan's report for former employer Aberdeen Group, sponsored by Berkeley DB vendor Sleepycat Software, indicates that with a market of $100 million worldwide out of a total database market worth $10.5 billion in 2003, open source databases will not increase market share as strongly as they did in the 1990s, when year-to-year growth was steady at 35 percent.

On the last day of MySQL AB's second-annual user conference, eWEEK.com's Database Center Editor Lisa Vaas caught up with MySQL co-founder and chief technology officer Michael "Monty" Widenius to find out what's on the technology roadmap for the open-source database maker.

In the interview, Widenius tells us that his vision for the open-source database is to spread it as far and wide as possible, both geographically and in a wide range of devices, such as PDAs.

Swedish open-source database maker MySQL AB plans to release a new clustered database product with high-availability support next month, company officials disclosed. The new MySQL Cluster combines the company's flagship open-source database with a clustering architecture officials say is designed to deliver database applications with so-called five-nines availability (99.999%, or less than five minutes of downtime per year).

The new cluster capabilities are based on technology from Alzato, a start-up venture created by European telecom equipment maker Ericsson in 2000 and acquired by MySQL AB last October. Officials describe the technology, called NDB Cluster, as a high-availability data management system designed for the telecom/IP environment. MySQL Cluster is designed to automatically shift workloads among as many as 32 servers, presenting the company with an opportunity to target larger organizations with its products.

The product is scheduled to debut at the MySQL Users Conference in mid-April, according to MySQL AB Marketing VP Zack Urlocker.

The open-source database firm has updated a licensing provision that forbade a common software combination

MySQL, an open-source database company, has taken a step to mend a rift in the open-source world by updating a controversial licensing provision that had broken a close tie between the MySQL database and another software package. The rift divided MySQL and PHP, software that lets computers construct customised Web pages on the fly. The two packages are found alongside each other so often, along with the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server, that there's an acronym, LAMP, to label the software combination.

Following in the footsteps of the Linux operating system, open-source databases are moving toward mainstream use and threatening proprietary software alternatives, according to a new survey.

"Open-source databases are in the experimentation phase of the market but will move to widespread acceptance by 2006," the AMR Research study said. AMR surveyed 140 information technology managers in December and released results this month.

The underlying code of open-source software programs can be freely viewed, modified and redistributed by anyone, a stark contrast to tightly controlled proprietary software such as databases from Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Challenges will come from three contenders in the open-source database market: MySQL, MaxDB and PostgreSQL, AMR said.

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