Scott Yang's Playground » MySQL

Sun Bought MySQL AB for $1 Billion

scotty — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:30:11 +0000

Big news today. Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB for around $1 Billion, in $800 million cash and $200 million options.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world’s fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. The acquisition accelerates Sun’s position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today’s announcement reaffirms Sun’s position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

Well, One Billion Dollars is a lot of money, but this is an incredible buy consider how the market evaluates this college social network at 15 billion dollars. As Sun claimed to be the dot in the first dot com bubble, MySQL probably powers most of the Web 2.0 start ups in the current Web 2.0 bubble. Not to mention MySQL is available on almost all the web hosting packages, powering many ready-to-install open source applications. Sun has also been transforming itself into an open source company. We have OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and Java — and now MySQL! They just need to somehow acquire Apache (or lighty?) to have the entire web application stack under its umbrella.

From Jonathan Schwartz’s blog, it is great to hear that Jim Starkey’s Falcon is still on track, as it is probably the next stage weaponary against Oracle, who acquired InnoDB earlier on. Interesting time ahead.

(By the way, the photo of Mårten Mickos and Jon Schwartz came from this MySQL blog entry.)

Found this comment on Slashdot:

Why did they buy it?

Didn’t they know they could just download it and run without paying?

Sure, it is intended to be a funny comment, but from commentaries from TechCrunch on this very event, open source software as business model seems to be a foreign concept to many. Even funnier fact is, most TechCrunch readers actually regard free web services as viable business model.

Hmm.

InnoDB vs. MyISAM vs. Falcon in MySQL

scotty — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 01:07:56 +0000

MySQL Performance Blog — InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon benchmarks. Great test and lots of figures and graphs. It highlights two things. (1) Falcon is far from being mature, Jim still got lots to do, but I guess that’s still pretty impressive after 11 months of work (2) MyISAM toasts InnoDB in read performance is a myth. InnoDB rules for now with low concurrency. Eagerly waiting for part II.

Jim Starkey Left Firebird for MySQL

scotty — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 11:30:53 +0000

There has been a series of acqusitions amongst database companies. Oracle bought InnoBase Oy and Sleepycat, two makers of transactional storage engine for MySQL. MySQL AB has then acquired Netfrastructure, a web aplication development framework. However, what MySQL AB actually acquired is not just the company + its software, but the main brain behind it. Firebird News reports that Jim Starkey, the founder of Netfrastructure, who also happened to be the father of the once open-sourced Interbase, has left his development on Vulcan, the next generation SMP-capable Firebird, to work full-time on another open source database engine.

That sucks. Especially when you know that your project would greatly benefit from Vulcan which might integrate with the up-coming Firebird 3.0 — provided that Firebird 2.0 is out of door soon. Looks like there will be at least a year away from SMP-capable Firebird.

But all the best Jim! Though I don’t believe that there is no intersection between MySQL and Firebird’s target audiences (especially when MySQL is scaling up for features and Firebird is scaling down for embeded systems), I believe Jim’s work there will bring open source RDBMS to another level, competing with other commercial heavy weights.