We are pleased to announce that Open Query, Queensland-based provider of MySQL, MariaDB and related services which just celebrated its 11-th anniversary, has been acquired by Catalyst IT Australia.

Founded in New Zealand in 1997, Catalyst is an experienced and respected Open Source integrator.  Catalyst is looking forward to the opportunity to work with the current Open Query clients as well as with new prospects. Catalyst offers a broad suite of Enterprise services, including support and custom development for Drupal CMS, SilverStripe CMS, Moodle LMS, Samba and other software, as well as fully managed hosting on AWS and other platforms.

“Catalyst’s core values are very much aligned with those of Open Query, which is why we are particularly pleased with this outcome”, notes Arjen Lentz, Founder and Exec.Director of Open Query.

Catalyst IT Australia has offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

It is my pleasure to announce that Percona has acquired Tokutek and will take over development and support for TokuDB® and TokuMX™ as well as the revolutionary Fractal Tree® indexing technology that enables those products to deliver improved performance, reliability and compression for modern Big Data applications.

At Percona we have been working with the Tokutek team since 2009, helping to improve performance and scalability. The TokuDB storage engine has been available for Percona Server for about a year, so joining forces is quite a natural step for us.

Fractal Tree indexing technology—developed by years of data science research at MIT, Stony Brook University and Rutgers University—is the new generation data structure which, for many workloads, leapfrogs traditional B-tree technology which was invented in 1972 (over 40 years ago!).  It is also often …

There was another acquisition involving open source software recently when Consona bought Compiere, but what is perhaps most striking about the deal from an open source software perspective is how little it and the Compiere community mattered in the deal.

By most accounts, including that of fellow open source ERP player xTuple CEO Ned Lilly, who offers an interesting and accurate depiction of Compiere’s changes, acknowledge the movement away from community that occurred over the last few years at Compiere. As discussed in our own recent report on the deal, we are also somewhat skeptical over the fate of what is left of Compiere’s open source community, even though Consona plans to …

We’ve long wondered what might happen to all of that open source software from Sun Microsystems now that it’s at Oracle? Obviously, some pieces continue to live at Oracle (Java, Solaris, MySQL), but there are a number of open source projects that Oracle has either neglected to talk about or have been overlooked, particularly as we focused on user reactions, implications and finally approval of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun.

One significant group of open source technologies from Sun is its OpenSSO single sign-on identity and access …

I am writing because Sheeri sent me a note about a blog post written by Brian Aker, where Brian concludes, quite correctly, that (in Sheeri’s words not Brian’s)


MySQL is now just a branch (the official branch,
but a branch nonetheless, and a bunch of trademark (logo) and
copyright (docs) ownerships).


This is exactly true. No denying it. Why bother. It’s true. It’s also true for the vast majority of open-source projects, by the way.

I replied to Sheeri:


There's no denying that. The product direction will be set by whoever sets the best product management strategy backed by the most effective development effort. And there can be multiple winners.
-Paul


Well, this is the kind of quality output I can be relied on. It might not fit on twitter, but it’s …

I met Scott McNealy several times over the last year in customer meetings and to talk about Sun's open source strategy.  He's a class act all the way.  He sent out his final email to Sun employees and partners earlier today. 

Here's an excerpt:    

    While it was never the primary vision to be acquired by Oracle, it was always an interesting option. And this huge event is upon us now. Let’s all embrace it with all of the enthusiasm and class and talent that we have to offer.

    This combination has the potential to put Sun, its people, and its technology at the center of yet another industry and game changing inflection point. The opportunity is well documented and articulated by Larry and the …

It finally dawned on me while reflecting on the year past this Sunday that the missing voice since the announcement of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems (and therefore MySQL) has been the MySQL employees.

When I worked as an employee for MySQL Inc, the acquisition by Sun Microsystems in 2008 lead to several requirements about the acquisition.

• You were not allowed to talk about the acquisition publically.
• You were not allowed to communicate with any Sun (i.e. the acquirer) resources.

In other words it was “business as usual” which is really an oxymoron, because business will never be exactly as it was before the announcement. The ongoing delay in pending acquisition by Oracle Corporation is really hurting everybody with getting on with doing their jobs, being happy with their work, and making a difference in open source and in the lives of all the benefit from using MySQL.

…

The bottom line: As both a community member of MySQL, and a service provider, I am not worried about Oracle buying Sun and acquiring MySQL in the process. There is no validity to the argument that Oracle will slow down or stop MySQL development — it is not possible, with various forks already in heavy development, and it is not probable, because Oracle has owned the InnoDB codebase for 4 years and has not slowed that development down.

My bias

I use MySQL, and want to see it continue to be developed. I work for The Pythian Group, providing DBA services to clients running MySQL. Together with my MySQL colleagues at The Pythian Group, the services provided run the gamut from rotating logs, monitoring, performance tuning, designing and implementing and optimizing database architectures and schemas and queries and debugging problems throughout the full stack. The only service we do …

Many providers embedd MySQL with their commercial products including Adobe, Macfee, Nokia, Symantec and ScienceLogic just to name a few. In addition most commercial third party storage engines have for years been forced to provided very customized versions of MySQL due to limitations in the storage engine API. These situations require a license agreement necessary with the trademark holder of MySQL. The Oracle Corporation EU Statement released on December 14, 2009 has carefully worded in the statement about these OEM licenses and storage engine providers there will be no changes for 5 years.

One specific detail is missing, what happens then?

As an individual that uses, recommends, promotes and advises clients especially on various storage engine …

So, is Oracle’s acquisition of Sun good for MySQL or not so much?  And, specifically what does it mean for data warehousing on MySQL, which is one of the top 5 use cases for the leading open source database?  While there are mixed views in the market about the fate of MySQL, it’s usually pretty easy to predict Oracle’s behavior - they are a for-profit company looking to maximize their return on investment and protect their own commercial database business. 

For what they’re worth, my own views on the subject can be summarized as follows: 

• (1) Oracle will not kill MySQL. As I mentioned to Scott Denne from VentureWire the week of the Oracle/Sun …