A funny thing happened on the way to the office
January 16th, 2008
I hopped on a plane in New York this morning and planned on writing a blog about new year’s resolutions. Resolution one is to “Stop Procrastinating” which might explain why that particular blog is three weeks behind schedule. When I landed in SFO, my blackberry almost melted under the strain of all the email traffic around the MySQL and BEA acquisitions.The BEA/Oracle announcement wasn’t exactly news to me, and I suspect that the Project Fusion team at Oracle are delighted to have the complexity of their middle ware integration challenge raised by an order of magnitude or two. Is this an interesting or strategic acquisition for Oracle? I don’t think so; in fact I’m reminded of all the Borg cartoons that were circulated around the Ingres team when CA announced they were acquiring ASK back in 1994.
In contrast, the MySQL news came as a complete surprise, and a happy one at that. I’d often commented in the past year how Marten Mikos seems to have lost his joie-de-vivre, since his role shifted from having fun with the community, to dealing with the bankers and business folks to plan a much rumored IPO. One issue that must have been weighing on Marten’s mind over the past year is how to address the transactional engine conundrum, an issue that became even more important today given that two cornerstones of the MySQL solution are in “enemy hands” with Oracle’s ownership of InnoDB and IBM’s ownership of SolidDB.
I just joked with Bob Zurek, of EnterpriseDB, that I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sun propose an arranged marriage between MySQL and PostgreSQL. Sun has some good PostgreSQL folks on board and it could be an interesting challenge for them.
Ingres went from being a forgotten technology in a company deriving a lot of its business from a competing technology to being an independent open source database company focused on growth, and now it appears that MySQL has gone in the opposite direction.
So, what does this mean for Ingres? Well to start with it makes us the only independent open source database company, which will no doubt open up new partnership opportunities for Ingres. The price tag Sun is paying for MySQL has many “swivel-chair financial analysts” trying to put a valuation on Ingres today. Above all else, I believe that Sun’s acquisition of MySQL is a ringing endorsement of the open source model.
To hear what other open source thought leaders in the Open Solutions Alliance have to say about today’s news, take a look at the blogroll at http://blog.opensolutionsalliance.org/. I promised them a mention in this blog in return for being added to the blogroll.
