PlanetMysql.ru – информация о СУБД MySQL

After two months of submissions, Monty Program employee review, community voting and Monty’s final decision, we are happy to announce that the Maria storage engine will henceforth be known as …

Aria!

Congratulations to Chris Tooley who suggested the name. Chris said about Aria in his submission, “Maria without the ‘M’, plus aria is a pleasant musical term.” Chris is now the proud new owner of a System 76 Meerkat net-top computer. Thanks to our good friends at System76 for providing this nifty prize.

Hopefully, in time, “Aria” will also be a pleasing database engine term. And now we will not have the confusion between MariaDB and Maria.

There are signals of continued problems and dysfunction — namely lack of support, organization and communication — in the OpenSolaris community. This follows on a deterioration of the OS leadership and support since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, including the elimination of OpenSolaris CDs, one of the things that made the open source version of Solaris more like Linux.

We had speculated on the fate of Sun open source software under Oracle and while we acknowledged Oracle’s participation in, contribution and commitment to and opportunity from open source software, we questioned its appreciation of open source software communities beyond code and customers. It appears the OpenSolaris community and thus the OS itself, which we believe is key to advancing development of the more popular, proprietary cousin Solaris — are not a priority for Oracle.

The same cannot be said for all open source from Sun, and there’s a lot of it, now at Oracle. Amid the struggles of the OpenSolaris community, one of the other open source keystones from Sun, MySQL, seems to be doing well, despite persisting claims Oracle purchased Sun and MySQL simply to keep it from competing with Oracle database products. According to a Jaspersoft survey of customers/developers, there is a lack of awareness or concern of Oracle’s involvement in MySQL (59 percent were not aware Oracle reorganized and established a separate MySQL business unit apart from Oracle’s traditional RDBMS business …). Another 43% of Jaspersoft’s respondents said MySQL development and innovation would improve under Oracle.

The Jaspersoft survey found even more love for Java under Oracle, with 80 percent of respondents indicating they believe the Java process will improve or stay the same under Oracle. The related GlassFish application server also appears to be healthy with both community and commercial versions recently released.

The OpenOffice community appears also to be continuing forward supported and unfettered by Oracle (perhaps because it was typically fettered by Sun?), but it may also me failing to fully seize the opportunity.

It has also been interesting to see how Sun’s cloud computing technology has helped give Oracle new love for the term and the market.

There are a number of key open source projects and pieces from Sun, those listed above as well as many others, that may be on the line right now (or may have already been branded ’stay’ or ’stop’). We will be watching to see how Sun’s open source continues to shine or to set at Oracle.

If you wonder why there hasn't been an update from me for quite a while — I just returned from two months of paternal leave, in which I actually managed to stay away from the PC most of the time. In the meanwhile, I've officially become an Oracle employee and there is a lot of administrative things to take care of... But it feels good to be back!

During my absence, Giuseppe and Felix kicked off the Call for Papers for this year's European OpenSQL Camp, which will again take place in parallel to FrOSCon in St. Augustin (Germany) on August 21st/22nd. We've received a number of great submissions, now we would like to ask our community about your favourites!

Basically it's "one vote per person per session" and you can cast your votes in two ways, either by twittering @opensqlcamp or via the opensqlcamp mailing list. The procedure is outlined in more detail on this wiki page.

As we need to finalize the schedule and inform the speakers, the voting period will close this coming Sunday, 18th of July. So don't hesitate, cast your votes now! Based on your feedback we will compile the session schedule for this year's camp. Thanks for your help!

As we have seen for other events, the MySQL community has been invited to attend and participate in conferences organized by the Oracle User Groups. After the past, present and future events in the United States, now we start with Europe. There is a MySQL Track at the DOAG 2010 Conference, the main event of the German Oracle User Groups, and the CfP expires on July 10th.

The event is of course important for German speakers, but English speakers are also accepted.

As the other events in the US, this is a good occasion for MySQL users to get acquainted with the independent Oracle user group organization, and find common business needs. There are many MySQL users among the Oracle User Group members, and much curiosity about this small database that powers the Internet.

If you want to get a talk at this conference, feel free to submit a proposal. Or simply mark the dates: November 16th to 18th.

MySQL users, don't be shy!

Follow Paul McCullagh's example, and get ready to explore a yet uncharted but promising territory.

My ongoing dialogue with Matthew Aslett inspired me to read more of his recent writings. An excellent piece Do not sell anything to your community is based on a blog post by Stephen Walli.

Inspired by Stephen, I also looked into a set of slides I recently created and will try that style for this post...

Aslett and Stephen make a great point:

the conversion of community users into paying customers has long been a concern for open source-related vendors. It has also long been a source of friction, with vendors that offer proprietary extensions being accused of “bait and switch” or otherwise undermining the value of the open source software in an attempt compel community users into becoming paying customers. In recent years the next generation of start-ups has learned that the best way to encourage a frictionless relationship between a vendor and its community is not to attempt to “convert” users at all.

read more

Monty says:

During the last 2 years, I have seen a lot of the people that originally worked at MySQL AB and who joined Sun together with me, go away in different directions. More than 50 % of them have already left Sun/Oracle.

Matthew Montgomery commented...

I'm curious where you are getting that > 50% number? How would you have any access to that sort of HR information? Sounds like one of those numbers that falls under the "83% of all statistics are made up" rule.

And Monty answered

The MySQL Alumini in linkedin group has close to 200 members, a majority that also joined Sun and this group doesn't include all people that have left. I have also heard the number 50 % from MySQL people that recently left Oracle, so I have good reasons to believe that this figure is reasonable accurate.

Then I left a comment, but I haven't seen it published yet. So here goes

Monty,

Your figure is far from being accurate.

The MySQL Alumni group includes at least 75 people (hand counted, there may be more) who are still working with MySQL at Oracle.

The Sakila Alumni is a group of former MySQL AB employees. I am also part of that group, but I still work with the MySQL team at Oracle. You'd be also pleased to acknowledge that, as of January 16, 2008, when MySQL AB was acquired by Sun, the number of all-time hired employees was way over 600. On that day, there were already more than 200 former MySQL AB employees.

If you have better information that doesn't come from hearsay, I'd like to know.

Giuseppe

Actually, if you go to the MySQL Alumni group on LinkedIn, and click on "members", and then on "advanced search", you get this summary:

So, according to LinkedIn, out of 194 Alumni, 49 are at Oracle, 49 at Sun Microsystems, and 21 in a time machine still at MySQL. That makes 120 people out of 194 who are still with the team, unless their "current company" is not up to date.

And, to make things more clear, let me add something. I was challenged to publish the current staffing numbers to settle the matter. Let me remind everyone who wants to get involved in this silly claim that the burden of proof lies with the claimant. I have no obligation to release company confidential records to dispel FUD.

Jono Bacon recently spoke with Luke Kowalski, Oracle VP in the Corporate Architecture Group, about community in the context of MySQL. Jono is somewhat of an expert in online, opensource communities – he after all did write the definitive book that O’Reilly published titled The Art of Community.

The video has made its way online, and Jono wrote a brief (and you can watch the video within his post) about what was discussed. You can also get it as a podcast – just subscribe to Oracle Technology Network TechCasts in your podcatcher.

Its under 25-minutes to watch or listen to, and I’d highly recommend you to take a look if you care about community, MySQL and direction. Choice quote: “Oracle needs to make a firm commitment to acting within the culture and ethos of Open Source to have an effective, fulfilling relationship with the MySQL community”. Definitely watch the video.

Related posts:

1. The future is wide open
2. Silona speaks about grids, databases, and open government
3. MySQL, with SHOW PROFILE and updated INFORMATION_SCHEMA, built from the Community tree

There was another acquisition involving open source software recently when Consona bought Compiere, but what is perhaps most striking about the deal from an open source software perspective is how little it and the Compiere community mattered in the deal.

By most accounts, including that of fellow open source ERP player xTuple CEO Ned Lilly, who offers an interesting and accurate depiction of Compiere’s changes, acknowledge the movement away from community that occurred over the last few years at Compiere. As discussed in our own recent report on the deal, we are also somewhat skeptical over the fate of what is left of Compiere’s open source community, even though Consona plans to continue offering both paid and free versions. At the same time, we are also wondering whether it will matter much — to Consona, to Compiere or even to its customers?

So how does this jibe, or not, with our views on how M&A deals and valuations involving open source software vendors tend to highlight the value of open source communities?

Community has served to drive up the price in deals stretching back for years (Citrix-XenSource for $500m, August 2007; Nokia-Trolltech at $153m, January 2008; Sun-MySQL for $1 billion, January 2008; VMware-SpringSource $420m, August 2009), but the reality in the case of Consona-Compiere (price not disclosed) is that community, or lack of a vibrant open source software community, may have actually driven the price down.

We must also consider the significance of cloud computing here. Cloud capabilities and possibilities in the enterprise version of Compiere’s platform may have trumped community in this case, but the deal still serves to remind open source software companies, as well as their existing and potential partners and acquirers, that community counts.