This morning, Sun Microsystems announced plans to acquire MySQL AB.

After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.

Being part of the group planning this announcement for the last few weeks, I have had the fortune to contemplate the consequences during several partially sleepless nights (I usually sleep like a log). And over the coming days and weeks, I’ll provide a series of blogs with various viewpoints of the deal.

First of all, let’s point out a couple of facts about Sun Microsystems — since all MySQL stakeholders may not be fully up to speed about Sun.

Facts on Sun Microsystems

• Founded 1982 by Andreas von Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy
• 34.200 employees worldwide, 13.9 billion dollars (9.4 billion euros) in revenues FY 2007, market cap (total value of all Sun shares) about the same as yearly revenues
• Grew astronomically with the Web, suffered from the Web bubble, now profitable over the last four quarters
• Lead by Scott McNealy until 2006, now by Jonathan Schwartz (a prolific blogger)
• The world’s biggest contributor to Open Source: Open Office, Java (now under GPL), GlassFish, NetBeans — and soon MySQL
• Environmentally friendly; large numbers of distributed employees working at least partially from home
• Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, just south of Cupertino (MySQL’s North American headquarters)
• Counts some of the worlds most brilliant innovators amongst its current and past employees

For me personally, I’m excited to get the opportunity to actively contribute to the successful integration of MySQL into Sun. I want to make an impact in merging our corporate cultures, and I look forward to making that a bi-directional process. Since I am based outside the US, I am particularly excited about meeting the many Sun engineers located in Hamburg (Germany), Grenoble (France), Prague (Czech Republic), St Petersburg (Russia), Beijing (China) and Bangalore (India).

But let me now turn to the more general planned implications of Sun’s acquisition of MySQL AB.

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for MySQL users?

Given Sun’s proven track record as the largest contributor to Open Source, I think MySQL users have plenty of reason to feel happy about the acquisition. There are many companies that attempt to ride the wave of positive attention towards Open Source, but in my judgement, Sun gets it right. Sun gets Open Source. Java has been released under the GPL. There’s the OpenSolaris operating system. There’s Open Office / Star Office. There’s the GlassFish application server. There’s the NetBeans IDE tool. And more.

Sun’s track record is embodied by individuals with a solid set of FOSS values, such as Simon Phipps (Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer), Ian Murdock (Debian founder, now Sun’s Chief OS Strategist), and Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL lead). I’ve met all three in various FOSS arenas, I respect their work, and I am looking forward to be working closely with them.

Anxiety on the part of MySQL users may stem from Sun’s success with Java and Solaris. Will MySQL’s support for other programming languages and operating systems now be given less attention?

Absolutely not. MySQL is still being managed by the same people, and the charter is still the same. There is no need for reducing the set of platforms or languages. It only makes sense for us to continue to support defacto Web development standards like LAMP, as well as emerging ones like Ruby and Eclipse. This deal is about addition, not subtraction.

But let’s dwell on the topic of Solaris a bit. Solaris has a special position in the heart of MySQL, as it was the first platform under which MySQL was developed. Linux came second. Internally, code coverage tests were long performed just on Sun. And with the DTrace probes planned as part of 6.0, some types of optimisation of MySQL applications are the easiest on Solaris.

I would expect that having access to the topmost Solaris and Java experts within the same company will accelerate our development for the benefit of MySQL users on the Solaris platform, and in the Java environment, respectively.

But I don’t expect that in any way to be at the cost of other popular operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac OS/X, other Unixes etc.) or development environments (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python, ODBC, C++, C#, VB etc.). MySQL grew with LAMP and MySQL without LAMP at its core is simply unimaginable. It was MySQLs part of LAMP that interested Sun in the first place. Hence I don’t see Sun having a platform migration strategy, but to continue to be an integral part of the dot in .com.

So while the news may be especially good for MySQL users on Solaris and/or Java, the news is definitely good irrespective of environment: As part of Sun, the MySQL database will have immediate access to technical, marketing, OSS developer relations and sales rescources that would have taken us years to build as an independent company.

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for the core MySQL community?

I’d like to think that the acquisition of MySQL by Sun will be seen as good news also by the core group of users who form the active MySQL community. This is because Sun is a safe haven for MySQL. Sun knows Open Source, and to the extent things change, I expect Sun to add value to our community. I don’t expect huge change, though. We continue to work with our quality contributors, we continue to provide our MySQL Forums, the Planet MySQL blog aggregator, we remain on the #mysql-dev and #mysql channels on Freenode, we provide MySQL University lessons, we meet at the MySQL Users Conference. We’ll put effort into connecting the many FOSS enthusiasts and experts at Sun — whom we will now learn to know better — with our active user community.

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for the MySQL employees?

Admittedly, this blog is not directed at MySQL employees. We have a different, internal blog called “Village MySQL” for that purpose (as opposed to “Planet MySQL”). But many of our users, community members, customers, and partners have close relationships with MySQL employees — and you may be interested in what Sun’s acquisition of MySQL means for the employees.

For employees, Sun’s acquisition means continuity. Mårten Mickos will continue to lead us, and our executives and key engineering leads plan to join Sun. In addition, our existing engineering staff will be invited to come over as well. Sun executives have made us feel very welcomed and valued.

Very important for our employees is the fact that we can continue to work on Free and Open Source software. We can continue to work from home (as most of us do, including myself). Titles, reporting structures, and long-term goals may change, but as acquisition goes, the Sun culture as I’ve experienced it so far seems fairly similar to ours.

And — whether it’s destiny, divinity or just good luck — we get the opportunity to digest all of this together, during the MySQL All-Company Meeting here in Orlando. It goes on this week until Saturday 19 Jan.

Being acquired by Sun is unique for all of us MySQLers. But for two very special employees, it’s something even more. I’m thinking of our founders, Michael “Monty” Widenius and David Axmark. I’m very happy for them. Sure, the transaction has a financial impact on them, and it’s positive. But we’re humble Scandinavians, so we don’t flash money, nor even talk about it. More importantly, I can see their heritage being in good hands at Sun. They didn’t develop MySQL in order to Get Rich Quick; in fact, they rejected offers that would have accomplished that goal during the Bubble. They developed MySQL in order to have a positive impact on the world of computing. And as a step in that direction, they took in venture financing.

VCs are more motivated by money than our founders, and obviously look for a return on their investment. That involves either an IPO or a trade sale. Of all candidates to acquire MySQL, I cannot imagine a more ideal buyer from a founder perspective than Sun Microsystems. If I know our founders right (and I’ve known Monty since the late 1970s and David since the 1980s), they will use this deal as an opportunity to accomplish even more within the space of Open Source and Sun Microsystems.

Congratulations, Monty and David! And congratulations, MySQL users, community members, customers, partners and employees!

P.S. I promise more later!

For some reason, Germany and Open Source go very well together. That’s one of the reasons I moved to Germany a good year ago.

Now, I note a new Open Source marketing consultancy popping up in southern Germany. Not that such companies are very tied to geography. It’s Sandro Groganz, of Mindquarry and eZ Systems fame, who has set up shop.

Sandro will help companies and organisations, both in their capacities as creators, contributors, and investors. Read more about this on his well-organised blog. Good luck, Sandro!

With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
• Tools: GUI, MySQL Workbench, MySQL Proxy
• Events: MySQL Users Conferences
• Licensing: GPL
• Architecture of Participation, Summer of Code, Virtual company
• Other: Release Policy, Documentation, Use cases

I hope this will make my blog more (re)usable.

(The picture is from this summer, when navigating the way up the Großvenediger, a 3662 m high mountain in the Hohe Tauern region of Austria.)

As noted already in March and described more closely in July, we had a MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg, opened up for selected members of the MySQL community. Since yesterday, I’m back and reflecting upon how it all went.

The first reflection is that I’m biased, since I was organising the meeting together with above all Patrik Backman (for the agenda) and Georg Richter (for the lion’s share of all real work, such as the coordination with our venue, Marriott Hotel). But I would still like to concur with the many MySQLers who think it was “the best MySQL Developers Meeting ever“.

So what made the meeting a success?

We got plenty of work done. Our motto was “Working Together“, making use of finally being together while going about our already defined goals. We had next to no overall one-to-many presentations (the type where each VP in turn preaches his favourite themes and people doze off waiting for the status report to end). Instead, each small development team met with other small development teams, based on detailed advance planning on which teams really need to meet. And we had plenty of seemingly random one-on-one corridor interactions, many of which were carefully pre-planned by goal-oriented meeting attendees.

We had lots of fun. We met in five-six different restaurants in the Old Town of Heidelberg. We had a great river boat cruise. We had a good team event seeing the Falconry close to Heidelberg. We went to the Kulturbrauerei to see how beer is brewed. And we concluded the team event by a superb evening in the old castle of Heidelberg. We ended that evening by some country-wise singing, started by the Ukraine and including the largest (employee-wise) countries of Germany, Russia, the US, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Australia, and Italy.

Our infrastructure was working. Heidelberg Marriot was our best-working hotel so far. Excellent food (including edible, healthy options, but not totally forgetting the mandatory junk). Internet worked all the time, even in the rooms. And this was no coincidence. Hey, this was Germany. And we have plenty of locals in Germany, and in particular, Georg met plenty of times with whomever needed to be seen locally from an organisation standpoint — right in front of his doorstep. (No wonder Georg got standing ovations at our closing Gala Dinner at Heidelberg Castle.)

We improved our meeting practices. We followed through on some of our innovations from smaller team meetings (like the one last December in Berlin). Team Leads were in charge of the days being but to productive use — with over 150 people, no single individual can ensure that time is used efficiently be all Developers. We insisted on good meeting preparations, and good meeting notes being talked. We spread the last-minute notes in outdoor roll-calls each morning, and in the daily Heidelberger Nachrichten (”Heidelberg Chronicle”) handouts.

We had Team Exhibitions and MySQL University Sessions. Nearly all thought that the Team Exhibitions invigorated all of us — where proud MySQLers demoed what they themselves had identified as Cool Stuff to be highlighted for their fellow MySQLers. And the twelve University Sessions spread the knowledge of the intimate details of how to code MySQL.

We had external guests, both customers and community members. Both categories gave us positive feedback for having been invited. We are deeply thankful for the input they gave us, Keeping It Real. But not only did they keep us real — they also made us a lot more polite and courteous than at some previous internal meetings. I heard very few negative comments or raised voices. Concerns were not wiped under the rug, but they were raised in a very constructive manner.

Thank you to all participants, external and internal, which made this event possible!

Today at OSCON, MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius and I presented the “State of the Dolphin” lightning talk.

My slides for this preso weren’t too graphic, which makes them all the easier to reuse in this blog:

Use our new software!

• Use MySQL 5.1, it‘s soon going RC
• Use Falcon, it‘s soon going Beta (new transactional storage engine, faster than InnoDB on large servers)
• Use MySQL Workbench (ER Tool), Now Beta
• Use MySQL Proxy, just released
• PHPers: Use mysqlnd (Native Driver)

Go test MySQL 5.1!

• We‘re happy with the quality
  • More stable than 5.0 was four months after GA
  • RC happening very soon, GA within a few versions after that
  • A better MySQL 5.0 (thousands of small fixes)
• We‘re happy with the new functionality
  • Table / Index Partitioning
  • Row-based replication – Transfers data instead of commands
  • Full-text indexing parser plugins – Flexible full text search
  • Disk-based Data Support for MySQL Cluster
  • Replication Support for MySQL Cluster
  • XPath Support - helps any customer wanting to better navigate and search XML documents stored in MySQL
  • Internal Task Scheduler (Events)

Other goodies coming soon (5.2, 6.0, …)

• Global Backup API
• Falcon and Maria (MyISAM++) storage engine
• Further new storage engines
• Hash & Merge joins (faster subselects)
• Federated tables over ODBC
• Foreign key support for all engines

Participate in our Development!

• Report bugs! Test them! Submit patches!
• Hang out on Freenode IRC #mysql-dev
• Subscribe to commits@lists.mysql.com to see our code reviews
• Attend MySQL University, the foremost education for MySQL developers (of C/C++ code, not apps)
• MySQL Forge: List your MySQL apps! Upload your code snippets! Fix the missing documents!
• Go visit MySQL Forge Worklog
  • Voting for best features starting soon

Hiring!

We are hiring outstanding C/C++ developers with systems or database engineering experience.
Visit www.mysql.com/jobs or email resume to jpugh@mysql.com

Coming to OSCON at the end of the month?

If so, I’d be happy to see you on Thursday 26 July 2007 5:20pm - 6:05pm in F150, where I will be talking about The MySQL Architecture of Participation.

Quoting from the O’Reilly session page:

While MySQL has been FOSS from the start and GPL since 2000, the development process at MySQL has been fairly concentrated around the company itself. One of the corporate goals for 2007 is to open up our entire development model:

• ensuring that our already-opened tools are open enough (our bugs system at bugs.mysql.com, and our source control system with BitKeeper)
• opening Worklog, our detailed roadmap and specifications, for commenting on MySQL Forge
• opening internal documentation from our closed Wiki onto MySQL Forge Wiki
• opening our internal chat sessions, moving them from our closed IRC server to Freenode

which all share the commonality of lowering the threshold for external developers to contribute to MySQL.

In this session, Arnö shares the experiences so far, concentrating on building up the network of connections between internal and external developers.

As noted already in March, we have decided to open up the MySQL Developer Meeting for selected members of the MySQL User Community, i.e. for MySQL users who have a need of interacting with our developers. In Sorrento 2006, Prag 2005 or Malta 2004, we had similar developer meetings — but the external representation amounted to one (1) customer presentation.

In Heidelberg (one bus shuttle hour from Frankfurt airport), we’ll do things differently.

Some key points:

1. Community Days are concentrated to Thursday 20.9.2007 and Friday 21.9.2007: While we have very few sessions closed for the community even on the other days (Wed 21.9, Sat 22.9, Mon 24.9), our scheduling started from the insight that few community members can afford to stay for too many days. So meetings that are of most relevance for Community generally take place on Thu and Fri.
2. MySQL University sessions are scheduled for the same Thursday and Friday. That’s where we spread our accumulated knowledge on how to develop MySQL internally amongst those who code MySQL, the Connectors, and Tools. Invited community members are welcome to attend physically, and anyone can participate virtually at no cost.
3. Team Exhibitions are a new form of gathering. MySQL engineering teams invite their fellow teams to celebrate success by showing what they themselves think is cool stuff — already in production, or in beta, or just in alpha. This doesn’t have to be flashy user interfaces. For instance, the Optimiser team may choose to demo a query that runs 75 % faster in 5.1 than in 5.0. We’ll make sure that our non-attending Community members gets to hear about this through MySQL Forge. And naturally, any external community members are most welcome to attend the Team Exhibitions first hand, both to get an impression of what’s happening, and to give us feedback.
4. Every attending non-MySQLer will get two hosts: one Community Team Host and one Engineering Team Host. The Community Team Host is either Jay, Lenz, Colin, Giuseppe, David or myself (Lenz will tell you know who is your host), and we make sure you know where and when the meetings are, we introduce you to the proper Engineering team members, and try to ensure your expectations are met. The Engineering Team Host is whichever MySQL developer who is the domain expert on your topic. Meeting with this developer is probably the reason why you came to Heidelberg in the first place, but do take into account that such devs are likely to be busy with many meetings in Heidelberg.
5. The detailed agenda is still under works. During the course of July, we expect to be able to publish the MySQL University schedule, as well as the tentative Team Exhibition schedule. Individual community members should also get a picture of what meetings they are likely to be interested in, through interaction at least with their Community Team hosts and in some cases even with their Engineering Team hosts.

External participants should expect to be firming up their travel schedule within the next week or two. This involves getting a firm booking from the Heidelberg Marriott Hotel (along Neckar River at Vangerowstrasse, a short distance from Heidelberg’s Old Town), which is both our meeting venue and the place where nearly all MySQLers stay. Expect to be contacted by Lenz Grimmer, our Community Manager EMEA (or contact him yourself at firstname@mysql.com, if you want to be proactive). Lenz is keeping a list of the arrival and departure dates and times of our guests.

Earlier this month, Lenz Grimmer and I approached the top Forum posters on our Forums (http://forums.mysql.com), thanking them for their contributions and soliciting them for feedback on how we could improve the Forums to make them more usable and fun to use. Especially, we asked for suggestions in these areas:

• for easier navigation / threading / search
• for ranking / highlighting / voting on entries
• for showing user profiles / avatars / case studies of contributors

Of the 24 people we approached, fifteen replied. Out of these, thirteen came back with suggestions, some of which were very detailed proposals.

Here is a condensed summary of the most popular requests/suggestions:

1. Re-enabling the display of new posts per forum on the front page was the most requested change by all.
2. The Forum search function received a lot of criticism for being almost unusable and rarely returning relevant results. It should be possible to provide more search criteria (e.g. selecting Forums to search) and the results should highlight the selected keywords.
3. Being able to rank/vote replies was considered a useful addition by several, also a ranking of individuals was requested, to indicate competence of posters.
4. Many were asking for a feature to better keep track of the threads that they have contributed to, e.g. an option to see all of the forum posts that they have posted and replied to or marking threads differently if they include postings from oneself.
5. Some requested improvements in the displaying of threads, e.g. being able to open/collapse subthreads/nodes, or moving threads to the top of the list when new posts have arrived.
6. Some improvements for the user profile pages were requested, e.g. a list of recent postings, number of messages posted, most active forums, link to the bug database (reported bugs) or more personal information.
7. Avatars were generally frowned upon, as being too childish and adding unnecessary overhead.

A big Thank You for good suggestions go to

• Felix Geerinckx
• Peter Brawley
• Marc Castrovinci
• Martin Sivorn
• Anthony Willard
• William Chiquito
• Sam Morrison
• Thomas Corbiere
• Kathy Mazur Worden
• Brian Papantonio
• Björn Steinbrink
• Harry Wang
• Dave “Guelphdad” Lake

Oh, and by the way: Our Web Team is swamped with requests. So don’t expect to see the good suggestions come to fruition too soon. This is just for you to know that we’re listening, and we’re planning some of the above improvements to take place. If you have further suggestions, email Lenz or myself at firstname@mysql.com.

Mårten Mickos, MySQL’s CEO, has just handed out the 2007 MySQL Community Awards. Given the growth of the Community last year, we had a number of very good contributors that we would really have wished to honour. This time, our choice fell upon these three community members, to which we stand greatly indebted:

Quality Contributor of the Year: Martin Friebe

“This awards recognizes an individual who has displayed remarkable efforts to not just find and isolate bugs in MySQL, but to provide good test cases and several times actually fix the bug and send us a patch. This individual scores the highest number of points in our Quality Contributor Program officially launched in January.”

Community Code Contributor of the Year: Paul McCullagh, author of the PBXT Storage Engine

“In recognition of outstanding efforts in contributing code and knowledge to the MySQL Community, this award is given to an individual who has not just provided the community with an entire transactional, ACID compliant Storage Engine with a specialty in BLOBs, but also integrated into MySQL’s Architecture of Participation to the degree of providing mentoring on MySQL Summer of Code and replying on the internals@ mailing list with precise answers on the inner workings of MySQL.”

Community Advocate, Communicator and Facilitator of the Year: Sheeri Kritzer

“Recognising achievement in the arena of communicating, connecting individuals, arranging meetings, and being a vocal advocate of MySQL community interests, this individual deserves the longest title of all MySQL Community Award Winners of 2007. This individual has made great contributions through MySQL Camp, through blogs, and seems to be able to respond instantaneously with plenty of insight.”

Thank you, Martin, Paul and Sheeri!

Lenz made a good summary of the DotOrg Pavilion exhibitors at the Expo part of the MySQL Conference & Expo ten days from now. To recap, the DotOrg Pavilion is a part of the exhibition area reserved for Open Source projects. Our attempt has been to collect the DotOrg pavilion to be a mecca for OSS enthusiasts, writers, speakers, and advocates. We are fortunate to have attracted some of the world’s most recognised free software organisations, and new up and coming projects.

A related type of reason to register for the conference are the BOF sessions. Birds of a Feather sessions are the informal evening sessions where people sharing an interest meet face to face. You can still organise your own BoF. There are sixteen BoFs already:

BoFs Monday evening 23 April 2007

• MySQL Data Warehousing and BI, Lance Walter, V.P. Marketing, Pentaho Corporation

BoFs Tuesday evening 24 April 2007

• Backup and Recovery of MySQL, Paddy Sreenivasan, VP of Engineering and Co-founder, Zmanda, Inc., Zmanda, Inc.
• Using Perl’s DBD::mysql, Giuseppe Maxia, QA Developer, MySQL AB
• SNMP/AgentX Management of MySQL Servers, Mark Atwood
• MySQL Replication, Lars Thalmann, Replication and Clustering Technology, MySQL, Jeremy Cole, MySQL Geek, Proven Scaling LLC, Mats Kindahl, MySQL AB
• Testing Tools and Techniques, Giuseppe Maxia, QA Developer, MySQL AB
• Scalable BLOB Streaming Infrastructure, Paul McCullagh, CTO, SNAP Innovation GmbH
• Performance Tuning and Optimization, Peter Zaitsev, Co-Founder, Lead Consultant, Percona Ltd, Tobias Asplund, Instructor and Performance Tuning Consultant, MySQL AB, Jay Pipes, Community Relations Manager, North America, MySQL AB

BoFs Wednesday evening 25 April 2007

• MySQL Cluster (NDB), Stewart Smith, Cluster Developer, MySQL AB
• Quality Contribution to MySQL, Giuseppe Maxia, QA Developer, MySQL AB
• Making It Real in the Enterprise: Migrating from Access to Enterprise Web 2.0
• All Things .NET, Reggie Burnett, Software Developer, MySQL AB
• MySQL and Java, Mark D. Matthews, MySQL AB
• Online Backup, Lars Thalmann, Replication and Clustering Technology, MySQL, Charles Bell, Senior Developer, MySQL AB
• Pluggable Storage Engine API, Brian Miezejewski, Principal Consultant, MySQL Inc., Brian Aker, Director of Architecture, MySQL AB, Trudy Pelzer, Project Engineering Manager, MySQL AB
• MySQL Monitoring and Advisory Service Unleashed—Come Make Your Mark!, Andy Bang, Director of MySQL Network, MySQL, Rob Young, Senior Product Manager, MySQL Network

Please check the “Birds of a Feather Sessions” message board located in the Conference Registration Area for up-to-the-minute changes and information.