I?ve already taken a look at MySQL?s changing business model and the potential business drivers behind the company considering introducing new functionality under to Enterprise customers only. One area that I didn?t dive into was the impact on the company?s development model.

This, in fact, was the focus of Jeremy Cole?s initial take on the news as well as a significant response from Marten Mickos. ?MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise,? explained Jeremy.

?As I?ve discussed before, the …

I was just reading Fabrizio Capobanco’s take on the MySQL excitement (”this move is clearly into the right direction”) when it occurred to me that the situation is related to the comments recently made by the former CTO of Kaplan Test, Jon Williams, at the recent OSBC conference.

As I wrote at the time: “Another point Jon made was that the subscription model helps keep open source vendors on their toes as every year he gets to decide whether they will received another payment.”

In other words, as …

“Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL” screamed the headline on Slashdot last night. The headline is not entirely accurate (although slightly more accurate than the bizarre statement that “Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything”).

So what is going on at MySQL? To get to the bottom of that you have to weave together a number of posts and comments from a number of sources. First the article behind the Slashdot headline:

“Just announced: MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise,” states Jeremy Cole, which is a much more accurate description of the state of affairs. “MySQL …

The solidDB for MySQL database engine for MySQL may have lost its sponsor following IBM’s acquisition of Solid Info Tech but events at this week’s MySQL Conference and Expo prove the certified engines program is alive and well.

Not only has Oracle announced that its Innobase subsidiary has updated InnoDB transactional storage engine, but there is also a new member of the certified engines program.

Kickfire has recently …

Today is the opening day of the MySQL User Conference - so I thought I'd describe a recent customer interaction related to the acquisition.

A few weeks ago, I was visiting the Chief Information Officer of a large commercial institution. He had with him the company's Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Security Officer (known as the "see-so"), and a series of lieutenants from various parts of their (large) development organization.

The Sun team had spent the day reviewing our progress together, and was finishing up with a product roadmap presentation. From what I sensed, it'd been a good day, so when I arrived, it was mostly to say thanks for the business, and ensure everyone had my contact info in the event I could help out going forward.

We had just closed the acquisition of …

“The question is not why use open source, but how to best use open source,” wrote Matt Asay earlier this week. It was a throwaway point but one that I think deserves more attention.

It occurred to me that “how” rather than “why” is the most significant question that open source vendors and projects should be answering right now as they try to encourage greater adoption of open source software.

There can’t be a CIO or IT director left on the planet that hasn’t either asked or been told why they should deploy open source software. They are either inclined towards believing the claims of theoretical benefits or they’re not. How many have asked or been told how they can take advantage of open source software?

Certainly those that are convinced or intrigued by the potential benefits will have gone on to explore …

It is interesting to read RedmondDeveloper News’s take on Oracle’s attitude to open source this morning, especially this paragraph quoting Monica Kumar, Oracle’s senior director for Linux and open source product marketing:

“”We haven’t seen our customers asking for open source databases,” she told me. “Not many customers are interested in looking into the code and mucking around with it, and making changes to it. All they care about is ‘give me the best support, give me the lowest price of entry’.” For that Kumar pointed to Oracle Express.”

It is difficult to disagree with the second part of Monica’s statement. Cost savings are routinely cited as the biggest driver for open source database adoption, while the lack of robust support is the biggest barrier to open source adoption.

Certainly these were the findings of our …

On March 4th I wrote about an observation we made concerning InnoDB locking behavior in combination with foreign key constraints. Since then we have been in contact with MySQL support and they in turn with the InnoDB developers. One of the conclusion I can already draw from the whole thing is that another level of indirection (InnoDB being a part of Oracle, i. e. an external resource to MySQL,

IBM has got back to me with a terse response to some questions I posed following its investment in EnterpriseDB earlier this week (sample Q&A: Q. Is the investment a response to Sun?s acquisition of MySQL? A. No). What IBM does not say is in fact as revealing as what it does say, however.

Here’s the official line:

“IBM has become a minority shareholder of EnterpriseDB. This affords us an opportunity to continue to participate in, and gain further insight into, the open source community. This complements other experiences such as with the Linux, Apache and Eclipse communities and previous investments we’ve made in Red Hat and Novell. IBM has been a long-time supporter of Open Source communities, and we continue to see interest among our clients for Linux and other Open Sources solutions. This investment …

Today sees the release of our latest CAOS report, Turning the Tables? ? The impact of open source on the enterprise database market, which examines - as the subtitle suggests, how much of an impact the open source database projects and vendors have made on the traditional relational database market.

One of the key findings is that open source software has had a superficial impact on the enterprise database market in that adoption has been widespread but shallow. While open source databases have been widely deployed for Web-tier applications, there has been minimal adoption in the enterprise application tier, and adoption for enterprise applications is at this time limited to certain specific application workloads.

Some people may be inclined to disagree with that assessment, but you only have to look at the comparative revenues of the open …