mysql

MySQL appliance vendor Kickfire raises $20 million

Kickfire is one of the coolest open-source (based) companies to launch within the last few years. Today, it announced that it has raised $20 million in series B funding to tell the world about what it's doing.

What does Kickfire do? From a business angle, it has figured out a clever way to monetize MySQL's excellent software. From a technical angle:

Based on a patented SQL chip that packs the power of tens of CPUs into an exceptionally small, low-power form factor Kickfire delivers a quantum leap in performance efficiency--avoiding the hardware build out, power, and space costs … Read more

60 percent skipping Vista, so Ballmer looks to Apple

A new survey by KACE, a systems management appliance company, suggests that 60 percent of those surveyed have no plans to deploy Microsoft Windows Vista, a 10 percent rise over a similar survey administered by KACE in November 2007. A full 42 percent of these are actively exploring Vista alternatives, with 11 percent having made the leap to alternative platforms like Mac OS X or Linux.

Forrester piles on:

Eighteen months after the release of Windows Vista, enterprise adoption is still in the single digits, and the majority of that seems to have come from upgrades of legacy Windows versions, not XP.

How does Microsoft hope to compete? By copying Apple, the company that is kicking its tail in terms of growth. It worked once before....

In an email sent by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Microsoft employees, Ballmer argued that "the success of Windows is our number one job," while acknowledging that to compete with little Apple that it outsells "30-to-1" it will change the way it works with hardware companies to try to catch up. … Read more

MySQL forks itself with Drizzle

In most companies, there are prohibitions against creating competitive, derivative works of the company's intellectual property. At MySQL (now Sun), well, things may be a little different.

As announced at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has launched Drizzle, an optimized and trimmed-down version of the popular open-source MySQL database.

In other words, MySQL has forked itself. "The right to fork" is, of course, a cardinal right of open source.

But forking is usually driven by rival factions on a project (e.g., the Adempiere developers forking Compiere). In MySQL'… Read more

MySQL bumping out Oracle?

Arjen Lentz spotted an interesting comment on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog, which suggests that Oracle may have cause for concern in its competition with MySQL:

I work for a major Fortune company, and we're in the process of putting Oracle on a "sunset" list of restricted vendors. No new applications are allowed on Oracle, the only approved vendors are Sun/MySQL and Microsoft/SQL Server.

An isolated incidence? Possibly. But where's there's smoke, there's fire. I imagine that this isn't the only Fortune 500 company that is looking to shave the … Read more

Ukrainian MySQLer needs help to cover the cost of his son's operation

MySQL has been very good to the open-source world. In turn, I'd like to see if we can give something back.

Andrii Nikitin is one of MySQL's support engineers based in Ukraine. As Zack Urlocker recently posted on his blog, however, Andrii has a major concern right now which has nothing to do with customer support:

Andrii's son Ivan, who is 2 1/2, is in need of a bone marrow transplant operation. This will require going to a clinic in Europe that will not be covered by regular insurance. So Andrii has aksed to see if we could help raise funds. The cost is expected to be $150,000 - $250,000. A huge amount for an engineer from Ukraine to cover. But a small amount by many people could make a big difference.

Consistent with your interest and means, I'd encourage you to help Andrii out.

As for how to donate, here are the details:… Read more

Sun downsizing...but upsizing its lead machine?

It's no secret that Sun just laid off 1,000 employees, and may lay off up to 2,500, but what is interesting is how Sun is offsetting the headcount loss with a more efficient way of finding leads.

It's called open source. As TechCrunch reports on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's Supernova talk:

His talk was about how Sun leverages open source by allowing its software (such as MySQL and ZFS) to float out and be downloaded for free, from where a small percentage of those users can be converted to customers. So through open source and free, Sun have the benefit of a free lead generation and marketing machine - especially with MySQL which is currently being downloaded over 70,000 times a day.… Read more

MySQL's Marten Mickos: No one can imitate our culture

Things have been quiet from MySQL over the past month or so, but today's Wall Street Journal has an awesome interview with Sun's Marten Mickos, perhaps the most quotable technology executive on the planet.

I really like how he talks through community (how to provide incentives, what to expect in terms of contributions), as well as competition. On the latter front, Marten talks through the value of leading through innovation:

MYSQL chief Marten Mickos isn't afraid his rivals in the database-software industry will ever overtake him. "Let them try," he says. "Our secret is … Read more

Why is Sun repackaging old news?

I was going to write something up about this announcement "Sun Microsystems and Intel Break Million-Messages-per Second Barrier for Thomson Reuters Market Data System" and relate it to how Twitter could leverage some design principles from financial services for scalability.

Then I clicked on the link to the Sun webpage for FinServ only to find out they had announced nearly the same exact thing two years ago.

A million-messages-per-second is still very impressive, but this is hardly news. Where is all the news about Sun's SOA, Cloud, or MySQL efforts?

UPDATED JULY 9, 2008: The fine folks … Read more

Oracle consumes 44 percent of the database market

Over the past few years, Oracle has bought nearly every enterprise software company in existence, but comparatively few database-related vendors (Sleepycat, InnoDB, etc.). This hasn't mattered, however, as it's gargantuan applications business is helping to drive its database business, now climbing to 44 percent of the enterprise market.

Verdict on Oracle's consolidation strategy? Big ambition with big returns. Well done.

Sun is trying to hollow out Oracle's momentum with an aggressive, all-you-can-eat pricing for MySQL, but the real competition in the short term is from Microsoft and IBM.

I'd love to see data on whether … Read more

Oracle raises software prices (Verdict: smart, but obnoxious)

Oracle raised the prices for a number of its products this week, by as much as twenty percent in many cases. While on the surface this seems silly in a down economy the truth is that it's actually a very smart move.

First of all, Oracle sets the pricing for the database market (and now possibly the app server market too) and therefore should always be looking for ways to increase their prices. The other important aspect is the fact that Oracle discounts heavily off list price. With a large increase (say 20%) they stand to even their loss … Read more