Pythian Group

I am passing this along — I am not sure if most folks reading this can make it, as it is last-minute and in the Boston area, but I figured I’d let people know that the New England Database Society exists. It’s free, sponsored by Sun (and has been for years, long before Sun bought MySQL), and is hosted by my college database professor, Mitch Cherniack. (To that end, I should probably make sure to promote the Boston User Group here more often! I keep forgetting…)

You can find information on how to be a part of the mailing list at http://www.cs.brown.edu/sites/neds/

Christian S. Jensen
Center for Data-Intensive Systems
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University
Read the rest of this entry . . .

This post is more of a personal note than most on the Pythian blog, but over the holidays, I couldn’t help thinking about my turbulent last year.

First, MySQL

In 2008, I worked at three different companies. It was about a year ago (January 15^th will be a year) I was at MySQL AB’s first company-wide meeting in a few years with more than 400 of my colleagues, when all of a sudden we get the announcement: “Sun acquired MySQL for 1 billion dollars”. Many thought it was a joke, just in time to watch Jonathan Schwartz come up live on video to greet us. Talk about an intense way of starting a year! For some reason, nobody thought that toasting with a shot of vodka before 9:00am was the oddest thing to happen that morning.

Working for MySQL was, most likely, the wildest ride I will ever have. True Open Source spirit (no matter what the rest of the world says), start-up mentality, and growth equal to one order of magnitude while I was there (a little more than six years). Being in the Sales team, I was in the front lines watching the evolution from the customer portfolio point-of-view, and it was amazing. I owe MySQL and its people my 100% commitment to Open Source.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Update from April 20, 2009: Oracle buys Sun and Oracle buys Sun: what does this mean for MySQL.

The following article was written when Sun originally bought MySQL on January 21, 2008.

At the risk of making it seem like this is all we’re talking about here at Pythian, here we go again.

Paul Vallee pointed me towards this article by John Dvorak that more or less echoes a blog post I wrote in French the day previous for my personal blog that you can read here: Le rachat de MySQL AB vu d’un paranoïaque; hopefully you read French and if not, maybe Google Translate will do a decent job; and if not well you can read Dvorak’s his is in English and he gets half the story!

So, first things first, Dvorak’s article leads me to think my theory is indeed wrong: if Dvorak says I’m right ; I’m afraid I’m wrong. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Play or download the podcast here: http://technocation.org/content/oursql-episode-24%3A-sun-shining

OurSQL Episode 24: “The Sun is Shining”

Sun Microsystems recently announced the purchase of MySQL. In this interview the day of the announcement, OurSQL asks Brian Aker about what this means for customers, community, Sun and MySQL.

Tell us what you think of Sun buying MySQL by calling the comment line or sending your voice through Odeo!

Links:
Register for the MySQL Users Conference Today!
www.mysqlconf.com

A special thank you to our sponsor, The Pythian Group, www.pythian.com.

Feedback:

Email podcast@technocation.org

I’m sorry that I haven’t commented on the BEA acquisition. It’s just been too obvious for too long, I can’t get excited even though it’s really really big. Manifest destiny manifested, that’s it.

On the other hand…

Tip of the hat to Lucas Jellema at AMIS who posts his own commentary on the acquisition and also provides this great find where
Springsource CEO Rod Johnson comments at length on the deal. Rod leads an open-source software company and I agree with Lucas that there is a hint of jealousy hidden inside all that enthusiasm!

Take-away:

Another link between these acquisitions are that Sun and Oracle now appear to be on a collision course. Oracle history shows their utter determination to crush any competitors in the database space, and their ability to do so. Sun is now a competitor in that highly profitable core business. With the loss of momentum from JBoss, the Java EE application server market now looks set to be a two-horse race between IBM and Oracle. Glassfish gives Sun a dark horse in this race, but it’s unclear whether this market category will show the growth to accommodate a new entrant, given the growing predominance of Tomcat as a production platform.

At 2 pm EST (-5 GMT), OurSQL will be interviewing Brian Aker, MySQL’s Director of Architecture, about today’s announcement that Sun Microsystems bought MySQL.

If you have a burning question (about the purchase), please comment here. If you’d like to be identified, please leave your name and where you’re from in your comment — just enough for me to say “Sheeri from Boston wants to know, does this mean we’re getting Sun T-shirts at the MySQL User Conference and Expo this year”?

The only criticism of the deal I could possibly give is that MySQL is still on the early phase of an exponential adoption curve and I think they’ve got lots of growth yet to come.

But really, a billion dollars has a lot if not most of that growth factored into the price already.

Think of what they get: huge mindshare in a 30,000 person company with an established presence and sales channel throughout the world. They get that mindshare because that same company is one that has struggled to find the next big thing, the next huge thing that is going to change the landscape of enterprise IT. Well they’ve found it. And they’re going to get to work on making it happen.

Not to mention that while Sun has not always open-sourced as early as they should have, once they do open-source software they’re pretty much always done the right thing by the community of users.

Not to mention that the nice thing about open-source is that we don’t really have to worry too much about it; it’s Sun’s problem to get ROI on a billion buckaroonees but if they give up at any point, we can fork it and take back over. We can actually do that now if we need to. I remember when Oracle bought RDB and then proceeded to kill it gently with neglect. The only way they could get away with that is because they owned the source. MySQL is not vulnerable to that kind of strategy.

And if I were a founder, I’d much rather go to Sun than to Google or to Yahoo, the other likely targets (mostly because of their vast adoption of MySQL coupled with deep pockets). Sun is a product company, a software company, and a support company, that actually sells these things, knows how to sell them successfully and take them to market long-term. And it’s filled with geniuses who are dying to hook to the next big thing.

In my opinion, a great move by MySQL.

P.S. I have started to reflect on how this changes the challenge posed by MySQL to Oracle. I think it changes it a lot, and in fact makes it a much more difficult challenge. I may post on that subject too if I can scrounge the time.