Sun + MySQL: One Week Later

I really like the 21st century open source technology community. 20 years ago, if a company bought out another company, everyone would have their own island of opinions and response, and you would not know if you were on-track or even if the publicized reports were on-track either.

Today, it is amazing to see the responses around the boards and blogs, which seems to keep the mainstream reports in-check, most of the time (including the picture on the left). I must admit I was checking to see what the "dirt" level of the buyout would end up, but all-in-all, this is something that most people seem to be confident about: this is going to help MySql and Sun in the long run. MySql will likely have a revamped service offering (the price gap between the community and enterprise versions is still sizable for small companies), Sun can integrate MySQL into their OSS, giving Solaris a bit of a facelift.

But where the rubber will meet the road is exemplified in how Sun will identify and utilize MySQL's existing strengths and run with them. Continue to improve InnoDB and MyISAM; I'll give a grace period for Falcon as that appears to have promise, and the third party engines like Brighthouse are fine too, as those are not financed my Sun.

Another place where I look forward to Sun's involvement and direction with MySQL is with replication and clustering. Linux heartbeat is a great utility we use now, and I may see hope with the NDB disk-based cluster when we have 5.1 in production.

I also am looking forward to a comprehensive binary backup utility (beyond MyISAM) in MySql; in my experience, mysqldump is trumped by rsync. Currently we end up doing both rsync and mysqldump on our system, and our recovery works almost like Oracle's recovery manager (...and instead of depending on rman to produce the best backup recovery procedure, I use a few of my brain cells).

After reviewing the posts generated through PlanetMySql.com, and tech articles written by respected journalists, and a newly released report from Gartner, the mood is very positive for the future of MySql.

Until Next Time,
David