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April 14, 2004
MySQL State of the Dolphin
David and Monty are delivering the MySQL 2004 State of the Dolphin, also titled "From the Basement to the Enterprise"
A little bit of history of the project, it's interesting that it wasn't until 1995 that Monty and David decided to write a SQL engine, and here we are 9 years later at the MySQL conference. The first source release was available on Nov 19, 1996, 1000 downloads by Dec 9, 1996 (now have 35K downloads/month).
Covering the standard bases, MySQL is named from Monty's daighter My (actually pronounced Mee). Suprisingly, Monty's son is Max, thus MaxDB (renamed from SAPDB).
Monty says the main reason for a good manual was when questions came in they answered them by putting it in the docs.
The dual licensing model was with them from the start. The original business plan was to not focus on database theory, but practical usability. At the beginning they set a goal to make it possible to install and be using in 15 minutes, hated the process of installing.
Review of the big names using MySQL: Yahoo, Cox Communication, Sabre.
How they make money: "If you are free, we are free, if you are proprietary, we are commercial." Also do support, consulting, certification. Funded by Benchmark Capital, spending it pretty slowly. Using it for marketing and documentation.
Support for huge set of languages, and almost as many platforms. SCO Unixware support is being stopped. MySQL maintains ~20 test machines and before any release they compile it on all machines, wide variety of compilers. Performance
Today MySQL AB announces the release of it's cluster software, available in source only right now. You need a lot of memory, the cluster keeps the tables in memory.
Review of new/upcoming features, 4.1 tree should be to beta in the next month, production in Q4, 2004. The future is to implement all SAP R/3, which includes most of the SQL standard.
Look at the crash-me, mysql administrator (not yet available for OS X).
The State of the Dolphin concludes with a discussion of open source, a slide entitled "Free Databases get Better":
- repeatable bug reports as as worth as much as code
- a lot of testing for new features, because people are asking for it
- MySQL hires people who already know the code
- Documentation is not limited to what's been written, you can actually go to the code to see how it works (also helps to ensure security holes are absent)
David, about software patents, "We think they suck."
Posted by mike at April 14, 2004 9:01 AM
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