Given the timing of my recent blog, Are Proprietary Databases Doomed?, I've been asked if I knew in advance about Sun's recent MySQL acquisition. Not at all! I was just as surprised and delighted as most others in the industry when I saw the news.

In the blog I outlined counter strategies that proprietary database companies might use to respond to the rise of Open Source Databases (OSDBs). One strategy was acqusition and I noted that MySQL, being privately held, was probably the most vulnerable.

The good news is that MySQL is no longer vulnerable. Sun has an unparalleled commitment to open source. No other organization has …

Given the timing of my recent blog, Are Proprietary Databases Doomed?, I've been asked if I knew in advance about Sun's recent MySQL acquisition. Not at all! I was just as surprised and delighted as most others in the industry when I saw the news.

In the blog I outlined counter strategies that proprietary database companies might use to respond to the rise of Open Source Databases (OSDBs). One strategy was acqusition and I noted that MySQL, being privately held, was probably the most vulnerable.

The good news is that MySQL is no longer vulnerable. Sun has an unparalleled commitment to open source. No other organization has …

We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we're acquiring MySQL AB.

If you're interested in the financial details for the quarter, tune in to our conference call (see details on sun.com) today - we'll obviously have more to say as we release our formal results on January 24th.

But the biggest news of the day is... we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you're an industry insider, you'll know what that means - we're acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world's most popular open source database.

You'll recall I wrote about a customer event a few weeks ago, at which some of the …

According to this article in ComputerWorld, MySQL to get injection of Google code. Google has signed an agreement to contribute to MySQL (oddly enough called a contributer license agreement) and will contribute source code for a variety of technical items.

In a way, this can be considered a very strong endorsement of MySQL by Google. Google even has an engineer dedicated to working with MySQL and the MySQL development team. I didn't realize that Google was such a heavy user of MySQL. Google will contribute some code related to replication and monitoring.

Also noted in the article is that MySQL, in the future of course, will support role based security and even Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). TDE is a big selling point for financial companies and other companies heavily regulated by privacy concerns. TDE puts the burden of encryption …

About a month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun to try to stop the competitive impact of ZFS on their business.

I can understand why they're upset - when Linux first came on the scene in Sun's core market, there were some here who responded the same way, asking "who can we sue?" But seeing the future, we didn't file an injunction to stop competition - instead, we joined the free software community and innovated.

One of the ways we innovated was to create a magical file system called ZFS - which enables expensive, proprietary storage to be replaced with commodity disks and general purpose servers. Customers save a ton of money - and administrators save a ton of time. The economic impact is staggering - and understandably threatening to Net App and other proprietary companies. As is all free innovation, at some level. …