Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL at La Sapienza University in Rome
A short meeting from 4.30 pm to 6.30 pm, in a modest classroom of the La Sapienza University of Rome via Salaria, with about 40 participants; but very intense, with a lot of active participation, many questions, a lot of curiosity.
MySQL, the most used and most widespread database in the world, used in the embedded world (MySQL’s initial business – it means that many electronic devices that require access to internal data to work, such as network routers, mount minimal versions of MySQL in chips), used in the web world by inexperts to make the sitini that no one will ever see, used in all pre-packaged CMS software, used by the largest on the web (Google) in ad-hoc modified versions, used in many enterprise environments with incredible high reliability values, used in the world of telephony, used by the open world encyclopedia (Wikipedia) and many others.
They evaluated that taking the top 20 alexa sites in the world as an example, they all use the MySQL database engine except the Microsoft sites (Live, Msn, etc) and Hi5. The percentage does not change much if we take the top 100 in the world.
In short, a very successful open source. And this great success led to MySQL being acquired by the giant SUN Microsystem at the end of February, a giant father of open source Java, and also of the JavaDB is a database engine perfectly integrated with Java, the father of starOffice, father of one of the most stable and professional operating systems in the world (Solaris), father of many highly successful SW and HW solutions, father of world-first solutions released in open source, for example recently released in open source a storage SW Virtualization and again a research on filesystems has developed a brand new filesystem (ZFS) which seems to be currently the most performing and multi-competitor there is, also very easy to use, we have personally followed a couple of webinars on the subject, as opensource is opensolaris that uses ZFS and also open the solution Lustre FileSystem, which represents an extremely scalable data storage architecture on commodity servers.
Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL now also Senior Vice President Database Group at SUN, Finnish by birth, a distinguished elegant and very tall man.
He spoke of the present and the future, of MySQL as a platform of the web economy. he reassured the present fans of opensource that the most used free database will be and will remain free, as he assures that the MySQL brand will never disappear, it will never be replaced by SUN, meanwhile Marten’s official email has the domain @sun.com.
After Marten Mickos, his friend Ivan Zoratti
(Systems Engineering Manager EMEA), finally met in person and no longer by phone, skype or email, spoke of:
From Zero to Infinite: MySQL’s Unlimited Scalability in the Web 2.0 World
He talked about numbers and how those numbers mean so much to MySQL, from the number of daily downloads of the community-based database to the number of online users on the site, to the presence of the database engine in most of the most popular names on the internet, to the high availability numbers, to the scalability numbers, to the challenge cost of enterprise licenses compared to the cost of oracle.
MySQL offers the same cost as an oracle license (1 CPU) = 32000 €
An infinite number of MySQL Enterprise licenses for an infinite number of servers.
Subsequently, Giuseppe Maxia, Community team leader, spoke about the professional communities that revolve around the MySQL portal, namely:
Very popular communities and forums, where it is possible to find solutions to all the problems of the vast world of MySQL.
We participated in this event, as well as for the historical passion for the MySQL database and to personally meet the people who have been working there for years, to see confirmed the real Enterprise support of the database engine if installed in a virtual environment, a question that we personally asked the MySQL people present at the seminar. We also needed to get in touch with SUN for some opportunities regarding their hardware. And we met the very kind Emanuela Giannetta.
A personal observation and a challenge for all MySQL programmers:
now that MySQL has merged with SUN and given the success of the ZFS filesystem, we expect a new engine that will soon use the filesystem according to some new performance logic on the disks.
