At the MySQL conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green, Sun’s senior vice president of software, dropped in unexpectedly in an informal dinner organized by the open source community and spent several hours chatting up the crowd.

Beyond the photo op and blogging opportunity, the visit was encouraging to the group, according to Zack Urlocker, Sun’s vice president of MySQL products. “It was a very nice touch, showing that they are actively listening to the community and understand its importance in the open source world,” he said.

The recent acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL by software supergiant Sun Microsystems has many asking if this is a good thing. SearchEnterpriseLinux.com expert Don Rosenberg thinks so. He tells the Enterprise Linux Log why he agrees with Andrew Kutz that this might be the best move for MySQL.

Sun now owns the M in the famous LAMP stack. A good thing? Definitely. Open source fans are always happy to see the success of open source pioneers, such as Monty Widenius and David Axmark who have been with MySQL since 1995. One might have mixed feelings about MySQL being acquired rather than going public, for it would be nice to see some large companies develop in the open source market.

When it comes to open source, Widenius and Axmark played by the rules, initially licensing under the GNU lesser general public license (LGPL) and later under the GNU general public license (GPL). Like Red Hat, they understood the value of a large, evangelical user base that paid no revenue but helped spread the product. But unlike Red Hat, MySQL owns all of its code, adding a proprietary advantage to its strategy. This allows MySQL a proprietary license and companies to embed MySQL in proprietary software without violating open source rules. I suspect this proprietary wrinkle of MySQL was one of the things that made Sun interested.

Sun’s strategy a concern
Sun has always been schizophrenic about open source, as evidenced in their Sun Community Source License (SCSL) and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). When it offered a Linux desktop, rather than putting the Linux name on it, Sun stamped it with the Java trademark instead. So it’s not hard to believe that the idea of actually owning MySQL versus merely being an equal user of the source code strongly influenced Sun’s decision.

That being said, I’m a little concerned about how slow Sun has been to warm up to open source licensing. In addition, as Sun was also slow to address the fact that software (e.g. Solaris) was as important to its business as hardware, it took a long time for Sun to wake up to the fact that many of its customers were Linux users.

This large-company lethargy influenced Sun’s open source possessions. It took years for OpenOffice to put up a Web page of add-ons, which were buried in a Sun database that only corporate purchasers would be attracted to. Some years ago Sun hired the leading developers of NetBeans and put them in its Prague laboratory, where they were to extend the functionality and reliability of the NetBeans foundation while Sun added upper layers, some of which were to be enterprise-level and proprietary. But outside developers were faster at add-ons than Sun was, and the young Eclipse (note the irony) from IBM was better at gaining market share and functionality.

MySQL’s future
But I think that MySQL has enough mass and momentum to hold its course, and the slow rate of change in the database industry may be more suited to Sun’s pace. Jonathan Schwartz said on his blog, “MySQL is by far the most popular platform on which modern developers are creating network services,” and Sun did have the long vision some fifteen years ago when it made the McLuhan-esqe proclamation that “the network is the computer.” In this age of cloud computing the network is a better-and-better bet.

The billion-dollar acquisition of MySQL by Sun also illustrates a number of truths about today’s software and open source market. The name of the game is support in one form or another. Oracle is trying to increase its support revenue to match its licensing revenue. Why? Because licensing revenue will eventually drop as open source databases become increasingly common. Sun is already offering paid support for Oracle and Postgres databases; it might as well be the go-to location for support for the most popular of the open source databases, MySQL.

As IT departments discover that database systems are taking an increasing share of the budget, more are discovering open source. Proprietary companies that want to survive will have to do it with better service and lower prices.

MySQL is an example of a disruptive technology. At first, it was too puny for the proprietary databases to notice, and satisfied only small users. But its powers grew, and the size of the companies using it also increased. It cannot match the upper limits of DB2 capability at this point, but it will be interesting to see if and when that day comes. But it doesn’t have to; it is already transforming most of the database market. May Sun invest the money (and employ the open source software developers) to take it to the top.

SELECT company FROM mysql INNER JOIN sun ON mysql.about_time = sun.smart_move

By now most people have heard the news: Sun is acquiring MySQL. I was sharing the announcement with co-workers when one of them said that it is old news. He apparently heard about it last night or this morning. But as you can tell from my SELECT statement, I think that MySQL’s acquisition is long overdue.

MySQL: Icarus rising
Some things catch fire when they get too close to the Sun, but MySQL is poised to set the world ablaze. A blog on CNET remarked that “an acquisition by Sun means that MySQL gets to continue being a pureplay open-source company and won’t need to sacrifice the ideals or the benefits of open source to suit a halfway (and half-baked) stance on open source” and another blog wondered aloud if MySQL was ever really innovating. I agree with both of these statements. The reason that MySQL has become the most popular open-source database is not because it is the best open-source database (although you could argue that it is), but because MySQL has a terrific support model. However, the technology itself needs to catch up with some of the competition, such as Postgres schemas.

Almost serendipitous is my previous blog about Trac. The Trac development community has a love/hate relationship with MySQL; that is, for the most part, they love to hate it. Their problems begin with the lack of schema support as well as many others. Perhaps as CNET mentioned, having some backers with deep pockets, MySQL might spend a bit more money on building out its feature set (I cannot wait for 6.0!)

A new Sun on the horizon
Sun has been busy this last year, first rebranding their NYSE ticket from Sun to Java, and then becoming a Windows OEM. Despite reassurances, it is obvious that Sun is looking to make moves that boost its bottom dollar, and acquiring the leading open source database server is the right direction to take. MySQL is famous for its scale-up architecture and what better commodity platform to scale on then one that can offer 32 parallel threads? Sun hardware + Solaris + MySQL equals one fantastic database box.

Will MySQL leverage its newly acquired wings to explore innovative ideas, or will it, like Icarus, get burned by the (ahem) sun?

James Governor over at MonkChips (a RedMonk blog)is waxing critically at some IDC numbers and a fellow blogger today. Specifically, he takes issue with a recent analysis that said the Big Three in databases — IBM, Oracle and Microsoft — are running away with the market.

Not so fast, he says, because what about MySQL? Rick Sherman, the blogger in question and analytics nut over at the Data Doghouse, opines that while open source databases will continue to grow the market, the IDC numbers show the Big Three are going to be stealing the database show again and again for the time being. “The rich get richer,” he says.

Governor disagrees:

He is unfortunately completely missing what’s really going on out there. MySQL usage is exploding. In many cases its being used as a bucket of bits, rather than a relational database management system. But check out 95% of Web 2.0 Services (that number is plucked out of thin air, feel free to challenge it) and they are using MySQL. Then look at look at companies socialized to open source. MySQL is everywhere. Would IBM really be running MySQL alongside DB2 if they weren’t seeing exponential growth across the open source platform? No. Way.

I’m inclined to agree. Not necessarily because Governor knows infinitely more about this area of the industry than me, which he does, but because it’s what I’ve seen in my reporting over the past few years. IDC numbers are great to a point, but the real world experiences and case studies I’ve read and written are the royal flush to their full house (played some poker this weekend, can you tell?).

The buzz from March’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 announcement has seeped into the end of April, it would seem, as this week’s recap is all about RHEL 5:

Oracle Linux gets backing from EMC, others
It was another small step forward for Oracle Enterprise Linux this week as a handful of ISVs pledged support, but it’s still a long road ahead for the Red Hat clone.

Open source monitoring shines light on firm’s servers
A successful Nagios deployment from a previous job led one IT administrator to continue the open source trend at his new data center with Solaris and Linux machines.

BakBone backs up Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
BakBone is expanding its Linux-based data protection portfolio to include the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

PostgreSQL or MySQL: Which is faster?
TIP - There isn’t always a clear-cut answer in the race between dueling databases, PostgreSQL and MySQL, says an expert. Find out his thoughts and how the two compare.

Red Hat author dishes on RHEL 5
Author Tammy Fox has been working with Red Hat Linux for nearly a decade. In this exclusive interview, she lays out important tips for IT managers looking to test or deploy RHEL 5.

I sense an SELinux-related series of articles in SearchEnterpriseLinux.com’s future, but that’s only because I’m writing them right now.

Poorly written queries will run slowly in MySQL. There’s really no way around it, but a slew of posts over at Digg.com are trying anyway. One blogger named Mike that I found today takes them all to task with a few tips on the proper way to handle this sticky SQL situation:

Properly index your tables

If you do a lot of lookups using a particular column of a table, or if you join on a column, that column should be indexed. Moreover, if all of the data that you are retrieving is available in the index (e.g. you’re using a multi-column index) then MySQL can avoid looking at the table altogether and execute your query using just the index.
Avoid superfluous queries

Don’t do this:

$result = query_db(’select * from table1′);

for each $result as $row
$array[] = query_db(’select * from table2 where column = ‘.$row[’id’]);
endforeach;

Do this:

$result = query_db(’select table2.* from ‘
.’table1, table2 where table1.id=table2.column’);

Look for bottlenecks

Don’t waste time optimizing queries that aren’t bottlenecks in your application. Find the low hanging fruit and correct those problems first.

Learn SQL

This is the most important tip. SQL optimization really has to be done on a case by case basis, and you can’t do it unless you have a good understanding of the language and how you can use it to your advantage. You need to understand things like subqueries, grouping, left joins vs. right joins vs. full joins, etc. There is no free lunch.

Lunch… hmm. What time is it? MySQL queries make me hungry — but only if they’re well written!

Also, are you new to MySQL? Check out SearchEnterpriseLinux.com’s recent technical tip on Getting Started with MySQL.