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So what is Drizzle?

* Drizzle is what MySQL would be with a more interactive community involvement in the design of the software itself, and had targeted website deployments.

* Drizzle is a version of MySQL that is driven by Brian and the community, attempting to solve practical problems that a large group of MySQL users are facing.

* Drizzle is a smaller, slimmer and (hopefully) faster version of MySQL; Features that the broad Drizzle community does not want or need are now removed or in the process of being removed (This includes stored procedures, views, triggers, grants, some non-pluggable storage engines and more).

* Drizzle is the 3rd fork of MySQL server code base, but is the one that has (for now) the most developers working on it. The two other forks are:
o ProvenScaling’s fork on mirror.provenscaling.com provided by Jeremy Cole. You should read Peter Zaitsev’s blog about this.

o The MySQL-5.1-maria fork, provided by the Maria team lead by me. (Brian did beat us when it comes to opening up the tree for outside development; We are still at least a month away from doing this).

* You can find out more about Drizzle at Brian’s blog at http://krow.livejournal.com/.

Read more at Michael Widenius Blog

The Sun faithful who attended the CommunityOne Conference this morning may not have noticed, but Sun and its MySQL executives were very clear about Sun’s open-source strategy going forward, despite news reports that seem to have missed the nuances:

The core will always be 100 percent open source. The periphery…will not. Or might not. It depends.

In response to my first question of the CommunityOne panel Marten Mickos, Senior Vice President of Sun’s Database Group, declared, “I just want to say that the core of MySQL will always be 100 percent free and open source.” The crowd loved it. Ian Murdock said roughly the same thing: The core will be open….
Read more at CNet

Sun Microsystems announced today that MySQL 5.1 will be available this quarter.

When this quarter? Sun won’t specify the date of the “pending” release but was good enough to post a “near final” release candidate today at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/.

The upgraded open source database, which Sun bought along with the company in February, features enhanced partitioning and replication as well as a new event scheduler and an upgrade advisor for the database’s enterprise monitor. MySQL 5.1 was launched at the sixth annual mySQL conference this week.

Read more at ZDNet

As Sun Microsystems prepares to close its acquisition of MySQL, the GlassFish and MySQL communities are announcing the availability of an optimized bundled release.

The bundle, announced March 25, consists of GlassFish version 2.0 with the MySQL Community Server 5.0 (5.0.51a) and MySQL JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) driver 5.1.6. It is designed to provide developers with popular open-source versions of enterprise Java and the database and give them easy access to the platforms to develop and deploy rich Java and Web applications, Sun officials said.

Read more at eWeek

Sun has claimed that completing its purchase of the open source database developer MySQL will enable it to become the most complete provider of open source server software.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s chief executive, said in a conference call on Tuesday that the US$1 billion acquisition “completed our capability to deliver a holistic, secure, open source platform for networks”, providing the last, key piece in a software stack that now rivals Microsoft’s.

The move, which Schwartz described as “the most important acquisition in Sun’s history and in the history of the modern software industry” is significant because: “What we see customers doing is migrating to complete platforms. The market clearly elected a proprietary platform for desktops and we see that happening increasingly with open source solutions on the server side.”

Read more at ZDNet

Go to the MySQL Web site and try to click on the MySQL anti-software patent page, and you won’t find it. It’s the other shoe dropping as MySQL today became part of Sun Microsystems, which like the rest of the commercial software and services industry, considers software patents a necessary evil.

Read more at Information Manager Journal

Linux Warehouse has been appointed as official local distributor for the popular MySQL database in Southern Africa.

“The Linux Warehouse is now supporting the local channel of resellers who wish to implement enterprise-grade solutions based on MySQL in the Southern African region,” says Riaan van Niekerk, general manager of the Linux Warehouse.

Van Niekerk says that up to now, resellers and customers would have had to purchase the software from European-based distributors in a non-local currency. Now MySQL is available in a local currency from a company based in SA.

Read more at Tectonic

In agreeing last week to pay $1 billion for MySQL, Sun Microsystems said it hopes to make MySQL’s open source database more attractive to enterprise customers. However, Sun has a lot of work to do, according to some MySQL users. It isn’t just technical fixes that are needed, they said. Although Sun described MySQL as “an open source icon,” it also will have to mend fences with users who are unhappy about the database vendor’s sales tactics and complain that it has ignored their development suggestions.

Read more at LinuxInsider

This morning Sun Microsystems announced that it was purchasing MySQL AB for $1 billion, $800 million of which is supposed to be paid in cash. This is a huge deal in the open source community. Two minutes after I heard the news, I begged an invitation to the “no press” MySQL company meeting at which the announcement had been made, drove two hours to Orlando, and sat down for lunch with Sun vice president (and Java creator) James Gosling and MySQL AB cofounder David Axmark. After lunch I corraled MySQL CTO (and original MySQL creator) Michael “Monty” Widenius and MySQL chief database architect Brian Aker, and got their opinions about how the acquisition might work out and what it means for both companies.

Read and look more at Linux.com

If you are curious about the Sun-MySQL deal — and why wouldn’t you be? — here are some resources for you that will probably answer most of your immediate questions.

First the primary resources:

Read more at Groklaw

According to a post on the MySQL blog site last night, by MySQL’s Vice President for Community Kaj Arno, Sun Microsystems plans to purchase MySQL AB, the commercial firm selling enterprise database products built atop the ubiquitous open source database which represents the M in the LAMP open source software stack.

Read more at Linux.com

It probably won’t slow the amazing growth of Microsoft’s SQL Server database, a cornerstone of the company’s earnings in recent years. However, a quirky Swedish company with a big Seattle presence may steal a bit of the limelight when Microsoft’s new database is released next spring. MySQL develops an open source database widely used by Internet companies such as Google, Amazon.com and Zillow and downloaded about 50,000 times a day. Similar to Linux, the MySQL software was hatched by visionary hobbyists in Finland.

Read more at LinuxInsider

MySQL AB, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, will be exhibiting at next week’s Oracle OpenWorld event, November 12-15 in San Francisco; Moscone South Hall, kiosk booth PSP32.

In the past year, the Independent Oracle Users Group has produced surveys of its membership that show that MySQL is an increasingly popular complementary database within Oracle customers’ IT departments. Between one-quarter and one-third of IOUG members report using MySQL in their organizations today — and a majority plan to grow their adoption of open source database technology in the next year.

Read more at LinuxLookup

MySQL AB, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, today announced that ScienceLogic, one of the fastest-growing network management companies, relies on the MySQL Embedded Database Server for the demanding data processing and storage needs of its EM7 Meta-Appliances.

In addition to ScienceLogic, customers who have embedded or bundled the MySQL Embedded Database Server include Adobe, Composite Software, Electric Cloud, Nuance Communications, Inc., Openwave Systems, Synopsys, Inc., Tumbleweed Communications Corp., Voltage Security, Inc., Zimbra, Inc. — and hundreds more.

Read more at LinuxLookup

My SQL has laid out its software road map through 2009, including some code contributed by Google and security improvements that are due in MySQL 7.0.

Earlier this year Google signed a Contributor License Agreement, which provides the legal framework under which MySQL can include code from another company in its database, MySQL co-founder and Vice President David Axmark said on Tuesday.

Google is secretive about the distributed architecture underlying its services, but it’s known to be one of MySQL’s biggest users, running hundreds or even thousands of its databases worldwide.

The search company has done a lot of work customizing MySQL to meet its special needs, which include better database replication, and tools to monitor a high volume of database instances, Axmark said in an interview at MySQL’s user conference in Paris.

Read more at LinuxWorld

 MySQL usually is touted as a cross-platform, open-source database. And it is. But the company behind it–also known as MySQL–probably takes in the bulk of its revenue on the commercial side of the house.

The fact is that when ISVs embed MySQL in their applications, the database is a commercial product with a commercial license. And the company derives actual revenue from license sales as well as from support contracts.

In a recent interview, CEO Marten Mickos said the addition of triggers, stored procedures and other higher-level database functions in the current MySQL 5.1 release, filled many requirements for OEMs. He would not comment on the percentage of revenue that flows through OEMs, but it was clear that they are an important part of the distribution mix.

Read more at LinuxWatch

MySQL has announced the availability of MySQYL 5.1.22-rc, the first 5.1 release candidate version of the popular open source database.

MySQL’s senior production engineer, Joerg Bruehe, cautioned users: “Bear in mind that this is still a “candidate” release, and as with any other pre-production release, caution should be taken when installing on production level systems or systems with critical data.”

Read more at Tectonic

Open-source database provider MySQL on Wednesday said it is injecting features into its paid subscription support service, which is aimed at simplifying management for large companies with tens or hundreds of servers running the database.

They include replication monitoring and advisory tools for database administrators that help them manage multi-server “scaled-out” architectures, where a database runs on multiple servers at a time. That is a popular architecture for Web 2.0 companies and other firms using MySQL and other open-source software in so-called LAMP stacks on generic PC servers, as it is considered cheaper than rolling out a few, expensive servers with many processorss in the same box.

Read more at LinuxWorld

MySQL has defended a decision to end free community access to the latest source code for its popular database in an attempt to snag paying customers.

Chief executive Marten Mickos said MySQL remains in full compliance with the principles of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), adding the company’s decision will help build a “well-funded business model” capable of producing yet more GPL software.

Mickos’ comments accompanied those of vice president of community relations Kaj Arno who insisted it was business as usual for MySQL Community and Enterprise Servers, saying both will continue to benefit from the other and denying they will grow apart and split the user base.

Read more at REGDeveloper

MySQL quietly let slip that it would no longer be distributing the MySQL Enterprise Server source as a tarball, not quite a year after the company announced a split between its paid and free versions. While the Enterprise Server code is still under the GNU General Public License (GPL), MySQL is making it harder for non-customers to access the source code.

• Read more: MySQL ends distribution of Enterprise source tarballs