Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Sun to Purchase MySQL

This could be good news for Oracle. 8-\

Continuing a string of surprising announcements, Sun Microsystems today said it plans to buy the makers of MySQL open-source database software for almost $1,000,000,000 (I like to see all those zeros). Sun does have a lot of cash burning a hole in its pocket, but it also has a less than stellar track record when it comes to acquisitions.

Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, wrote on his blog:

"MySQL is already the performance leader on a variety of benchmarks - we’ll make performance leadership the default for every application we can find (and on every vendor’s hardware platforms, not just Sun’s - and on Linux, Solaris, Windows, all). ..."

Not on TPC benchmarks, it's not. And the reason for that has less to do with performance than it does with being able to pass the TPC ACID tests:

  • Atomicity
  • Consistency
  • Isolation
  • Durability

which are measures of database robustness. The ACID tests are an integral requirement of any audited TPC benchmark. If you can't pass the ACID tests, you don't get to show off your performance ratings; no matter how competitive they might be. Whether or not you regard TPC benchmarks as realistic, they are used throughout the industry to rank vendor platforms during procurement cycles (read: sales). So, it will be interesting to see how long it takes Sun (a current TPC participant) to produce the first official MySQL TPC-C benchmark result.

On the other hand, since Marten Mickos (MySQL CEO) already stated publicly:

“MySQL was developed for online world. Our relevance grows in the enterprise as they shift to Web-based architectures.”

they might hedge their bets and do a TPC-App benchmark instead, because that workload is designed to simulate web applications; not to mention that there are fewer official TPC-App results to compare against. Such details notwithstanding, any TPC benchmark would represent a true litmus test for MySQL.

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