With MySQL buy, will Sun set on its other database partners?
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By paying $1 billion to purchase MySQL, Sun seems to be giving a pretty clear signal about the centrality of the popular open-source database to the company's planned open-source software stack. But users and vendors of the many other databases Sun supports and sells insist that they're just fine, thank you, with the new sibling. Really.
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Sun announced Tuesday that it is buying Innotek, maker of VirtualBox, virtualization software that may have more value for software developers than datacenter administrators.Steve Wilson, vice president of&#160;Sun&#39;s nascent xVM virtualization line, called the purchase a &quot;huge deal&quot; for xVM and &quot;even Sun as a whole,&quot; on his official blog Tuesday. Terms of the deal to buy the German company, expected to close in Sun&#39;s fiscal third quarter, were not disclosed.&quot;VirtualBox is software designed to allow users to run multiple operating systems on top of whatever OS they currently have installed,&quot; he wrote. &quot;Whether you choose Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris as your default desktop of choice, VirtualBox will ride on top of it and allow you to &#39;host&#39; any arbitrary collection of operating system instances. Software developers everywhere are starting to discover this way of operating, and these desktop virtualization solutions are quickly becoming part of the common developer toolkit.&quot;&quot;While there are other applications that provide this capability, VirtualBox is free, open source, and supports a wide range of operating systems,&quot; Wilson added. The software has been downloaded more than 4 million times since it was released roughly one year ago, according to Sun.VirtualBox may sound similar to Sun&#39;s own xVM Server, but the two products are targeted at different markets, Wilson said. xVM Server, announced in November, is a hypervisor that installs on top of the hardware. &quot;It&#39;s a purpose-built software appliance with functionality to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT. ... This is datacenter grade virtualization,&quot; he said.In comparison, VirtualBox is &quot;a software developer&#39;s dream,&quot; he said. &quot;You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multitier or cross platform applications -- all on a single box. ... Where xVM Server is competitive with something like VMware ESX Server, VirtualBox is more like VMware Workstation/Fusion or Parallels Desktop.&quot;The product will continue to be free, and for strategic reasons, according to Wilson. &quot;The developers that build applications have a huge amount of influence on how they&#39;re deployed. We believe that developers using VirtualBox can help guide their friends in the data center towards xVM Server as the preferred deployment engine,&quot; he said.Sun may also look to align VirtualBox with its other developer-oriented assets, such as NetBeans and Glassfish, he said.&quot;Having a virtual lab story -- assuming it works and developers and QA like it -- is good for a developer-friendly company like Sun,&quot; said Michael Cot&#233;, an analyst with Redmonk. &quot;But I&#39;m not familiar with VirtualBox, so I don&#39;t know if it in particular is good or bad.&quot;Programmers who aren&#39;t using virtualization now ought to start, Cot&#233; said. &quot;You&#39;d have to be one of those self-flagellation types to not want virtual labs in your developer tool-chains,&quot; he said. &quot;Maintaining a bunch of physical machines is tedious. If I&#39;m a developer and I have to write software that runs on four different platforms, spread out over however many different versions of Windows, Linux distros, OS X, et cetera, all of those machines add up. And then creating &#39;fresh installs&#39; of them for testing gets worse.&quot;
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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.  Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion â helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash.  But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups. read more
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Some enterprise database users and industry analysts with whom BetaNews spoke today believe the purchase of open source database producer MySQL by Sun Microsystems could have an across-the-board effect on the entire database market.
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Sun described on Wednesday a growth strategy that depends in large part on giving away software in the hope that customers will like it enough to sign up for support contracts and perhaps buy Sun hardware on which to run it.It&#39;s a strategy Sun started several years ago with a free version of its application server and that it has accelerated with such products&#160;as StarOffice, OpenSolaris, its Open xVM virtualization software, and, most recently,&#160;its acquisition of the open-source database vendor MySQL.The free software allows Sun to build communities of developers who will do pilot projects with its software and may eventually buy licenses for commercial deployment, or buy professional services to support critical applications, CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz said at the company&#39;s press day Wednesday. He called Sun&#39;s software a &quot;media asset&quot; for building communities.&quot;These are no longer simply software products, these are media properties -- networks around which communities are being built, [and] this is a means for Sun to talk to a very large developer community,&quot; he said.He put up a slide that showed a map of the world covered in pink dots. Each dot represented a download of Solaris, he said, and hence an opportunity for Sun to start a dialogue with IT people that could lead to a sale of its services and hardware.&quot;Not all customers will pay for these products before they use them -- very few will, actually,&quot; he admitted. But they all buy servers and storage on which to run the software, and the download gives Sun a foot in the door to try to capture that sale.&quot;The reason MySQL was interesting to us is it puts 50,000 new dots on that map every day, and from the community, market opportunities will emerge,&quot; Schwartz said.Sun&#39;s growth is important to customers. Its revenue funds its research and development efforts, and customers want to know there is a big community of specialists in Sun products to support their businesses.Analysts are divided about the strategy. At Sun&#39;s financial analyst conference last week, Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi said he found it hard to see a link between software downloads and Sun&#39;s revenue growth.&quot;If you were to plot a chart showing revenue growth over the last 12 quarters and Solaris downloads, there would really be no correlation at all,&quot; Sacconaghi said.&quot;Oh, I think there would be an exceptional correlation,&quot; Schwartz replied. &quot;If you had shut those downloads off three years ago, our revenue would have been declining double-digit.&quot;He reiterated the point Wednesday. Sun&#39;s strongest growth period came in the late 1990s and was preceded by wide use of its software in universities, he said. Today, the growth of Sun&#39;s Niagara servers has been driven by making Solaris open source, Schwartz said.Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said there probably is a connection between Sun&#39;s free and open-source software strategy and its revenue growth, but even if there is not, the strategy is helping the company, he said.&quot;Even if you can&#39;t say that each pink dot equals $372, I think the things Sun has been doing with open source and OpenSolaris and Java and so forth have translated into improved relevancy and an improved perception of Sun, and at some level, logic suggests that this played a role in their improved financial picture.&quot;
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Although real comparability to Oracle and IBM databases could still be some time away, MySQL's new authorized hosting program might help broaden out the niche for the open source database a lot more quickly.
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Almost lost in the clamor over Sun's expanded partnership with Microsoft on Wednesday was a small acquisition that will bolster Sun's HPC storage offerings. Sun agreed to acquire a majority of the assets of Cluster File Systems.
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Site Offer Save a whopping 50% on definitive MySQL guides
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Oracle may be willing to spend a record sum -- over $6 billion -- to acquire a middleware provider it believes will give it a permanent leg up on Microsoft's SQL Server. Does it still take a huge M&A like this to stay on par with Microsoft?
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to buy open-source software maker MySQL AB for $1 billion, beefing up the server maker's database offerings with a company whose technology is used by some of the world's biggest Web sites.
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MySQL has laid out its software road map through 2009, including some code contributed by Google and security improvements that are due in MySQL 7.0.Earlier this year Google signed a Contributor License Agreement, which provides the legal framework under which MySQL can include code from another company in its database, MySQL co-founder and Vice President David Axmark said on Tuesday.Google is secretive about the distributed architecture underlying its services, but it&#39;s known to be one of MySQL&#39;s biggest users, running hundreds or even thousands of its databases worldwide.The search company has done a lot of work customizing MySQL to meet its special needs, which include better database replication, and tools to monitor a high volume of database instances, Axmark said in an interview at MySQL&#39;s user conference in Paris.MySQL will include some of those capabilities in future versions of its database, probably in point upgrades to MySQL 6.0, which is scheduled for general availability in late 2008, Axmark said.Google benefits because the add-ons become part of the official MySQL product and are included in big fixes and future upgrades. MySQL could benefit from some of Google&#39;s custom software -- although it requires considerable work by the database vendor.&quot;It takes time to analyze what&#39;s relevant for everyone, what&#39;s doable, and how can we work it into a new version,&quot; said Kaj Arno, MySQL vice president for community relations. &quot;There&#39;s huge potential, but there&#39;s also lots of work.&quot;Google develops the add-ons only for the operating system it uses, Linux, so MySQL will need to port, test, and document the additions for the 15 or so OSes it supports.The features in MySQL 6.0 are already fairly set, Axmark said, so the Google code won&#39;t appear before version 6.1, due in early 2009. Some Google code is already in the source code for MySQL 4.1, he said, but not in a supported MySQL product.The companies are in close contact, Axmark said. The Google engineer in charge of its MySQL deployments spent several days at MySQL&#39;s internal developer meeting in Heidelberg, Germany, last month. Google has also released source code for some MySQL tools it developed.At its developer event in Paris, MySQL laid out an unusually long roadmap stretching to MySQL 7.0, which will be generally available in late 2009 and focus on security improvements for enterprise users.&quot;Many of you have told us you want better security in the database, and we have listened,&quot; Robin Schumacher, MySQL director of product management, told developers.Many of the features are standard in more mature databases from IBM and Oracle, Schumacher acknowledged in an interview. MySQL positions itself as a low-cost alternative to those products, with less sophisticated features that are sufficient for most users, most of the time.Schumacher said version 7.0 will support role- and group-based security, which allows administrators to set privileges for groups of users centrally instead of individually. It will also have &quot;transparent data encryption&quot; built into the database, so developers don&#39;t have to include it at the application level.MySQL hopes the security features will win it financial, government and retail customers, some of whom add the capabilities themselves. &quot;If we get the door slammed in our face in an account, this is one of the reasons it happens,&quot; Schumacher said.In the nearer term, MySQL 5.1 is scheduled for general availability in the first quarter next year. Advances include table and index partitioning, which should boost data warehousing performance, and the option of row-based replication, which lets companies create more exact back-up replicas.The big change in 6.0 will be the availability of&#160;MySQL&#39;s storage engine, Falcon. The most popular storage engine for MySQL has historically been InnoDB, but two years ago Oracle acquired InnoDB&#39;s developer, Innobase. Oracle continued to license the software to MySQL, but MySQL wanted an alternative.Falcon will do crash recovery and roll-back operations faster than InnoDB because they are done from main memory, Schumacher said, but some InnoDB features, like foreign key support and full-text indexing, won&#39;t be supported until MySQL 6.1.6.1 is due to go into beta in mid-2008 and start to ship widely in 2009. Improvements include better prepared statements and server-side cursors, Schumacher said.Despite all the buzz a few years ago about native XML (Extensible Markup Language) support, Axmark said he&#39;s still waiting for a clear signal about what customers want. Until then it&#39;s not a big priority for MySQL, although there are some XML capabilities in 5.1, he said.
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Sybase said on Tuesday that it will partner with IBM to sell its Linux database software, potentially dealing a blow to Sun, another long-standing partner.
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(InfoWorld) - Developers at open-source player MySQL are hard at work on a project code-named "Merlin", which isÂ designed to make it easier for customers to manage and maintain the company's database software, a source close to MySQL says. Merlin is a server-based database monitoring and advisory service which continually scans a user's database network for any likely system crashes, bottlenecks or security vulnerabilities, the source said. Under development at MySQL for 22 months, Merlin is due to debut late in the fourth quarter of this calendar year or early in the first quarter of 2007. It's unclear whether Merlin contains any third-party software or if MySQL developers have modeled the offering on any existing database monitoring and advisory service. The aim of Merlin is to simplify MySQL database administration for both small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and enterprises. While SMBs often can't afford to employ database administrators (DBAs) to look after their MySQL implementations, larger firms are running into difficulties trying to find sufficient DBAs with specific MySQL skills. Customer demand was a strong factor in the vendor deciding to create Merlin, the source added. In an interview Friday, Marten Mickos, chief executive officer at MySQL, declined to comment on the project. However, he said that one of his company's main focuses in the coming year will be to provide tools and other offerings to make life easier for MySQL DBAs. "Our first wave of users in the '90s were not database developers," Mickos said. "In the twenty-first century, we've been enabling database developers. Now, we're thinking of ways to help DBAs and take care of them." Merlin acts as a "virtual DBA" or "a constant MySQL consultant," the source said, alerting users to potential system issues before they become critical and offering fixes, tips and tuning options to improve the performance of the MySQL database. So far, Merlin has 50-plus database rules that it can check and provide advice on, with the expectation that both MySQL and its customers will build more customized rules in future. Merlin, now being beta-tested at 24 customer sites, will be rolled into the MySQL Network subscription service, the source said.
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It couldn't happen to a better set of people. As 'BusinessWeek' reports, MySQL is well on its way to an IPO. The interesting thing is what it's doing to get there. From CNET's Blogs network.
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Sweet Caroline Here's Sun Microsystems. Ahead of the curve with utility computing? Check. Interested in gaining the business of today's internet companies? Big check. Full of server-side software skills? Check. Behind Amazon.com of all companies in actually putting these things together as a product or service companies can buy? Yep.â¦
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InfoWorld - With Sun Microsystems' $1 billion acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL announced Wednesday, Sun gets ownership of a major player in the open source software industry while MySQL gets the backing of a multibillion-dollar, established systems company.
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With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.   With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.   Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.