If you track the database world outside of MySQL, you know that Oracle is having a conference this week. It’s called Oracle Open World. Drips with irony doesn’t it? But this post isn’t about Oracle being open or otherwise.

This post is about the announcement being made Wednesday. It seems Oracle has a surprise. A pretty well kept surprise. It’s such a big deal that Larry Ellison himself is making the announcement.

Some people, including some of my colleagues at Pythian, are speculating that this is going to be an announcement about a share-nothing clustering solution.

In the first quarter of 2007, I interviewed with a company in Atlanta, seeking my first full-time job as a MySQL database administrator. They were an online company building a social-networking website with a virtual world interface (kind of like Second Life, from what I understood). They were using an (at the time) fairly unstable version of MySQL 5.1 only because it offered clustering with the ability to store data on disk while keeping the indexes in memory. Previously, in version 5.0, everything had to be stored in-memory. Much has improved with MySQL clustering since that time.

While I don’t know for certain that Larry is going to announce in-memory clustering, I kind of hope that is what it’s all about, because it would demonstrate this: Oracle is walking a trail blazed by MySQL.