Sun Brings the Adrenaline Shot For MySQL AB

Being a MySQL user has felt increasingly untenable. MySQL is a fantastic product but MySQL AB (the company) has done a stunningly poor job of leading the community. MySQL's amazing adoption rate has come almost in spite of MySQL AB's best efforts.

From trying to enforce bizarre takes on licensing, partnering with asshats, having core technology bought out from under them by their competitors, the awful enterprise / community split, to not addressing serious performance and concurrency issues. Seriously guys, we don't even need you to lead, just get out of the fucking way, we're excellent drivers.

As Don MacAskill from SmugMug wrote, ""support (fixing InnoDB's concurrency problems) is increasingly at odds with the business (releasing a commercial binary-only Enterprise release)."

Persisting as a MySQL user in the face of all this has felt a bit like (cliche warning) continuing to tune up my violin on the deck of the titanic. But, to mix a deadly cocktail of metaphors, just when I was afraid that MySQL AB might overdose on FAIL,

here comes Sun with the adrenaline shot and all i can think is thank fucking god. I've never been so happy to see Jonathan Schwartz's ponytail (and btw, doesn't Schwartz look just a bit like Travolta in Pulp Fiction?).


Totally clutch adrenaline shots to the chest aside, I'm a big fan of Sun, with the usual caveats. I believe they are seriously committed to open source and will bring some hard-core talent to bear on MySQL. They have some brilliant engineers (just two among many others) and the company has made a lot of changes for the better under Schwartz.

I expect some people will be unhappy about this, but lots of people whose opinion I value are happy - Brain "Krow" Aker, Mike Kruckenberg, Tim O'Reilly, Jeremy Zawodny, Kevin Burton, and Don MacAskill all seem optimistic. Jeremy Cole's reaction is also mostly positive and he has excellent specific suggestions for Sun.