It seems (there's been no official announcement) that Sun closed a $10 million Mysql deal. Who said there's no business opportunity with Free and Open Source Software?

After Sun's acquisition of Mysql, some questions arose about the future. Some answer are now available: version 5.1 has been released announced. What's more, after IBM exit from the storage engine, several news in that field have come out: Oracle released a new version of Innodb, and Kickfire unveiled their datawarehouse solution based on Mysql.

UPDATE: this news wrongly stated that Mysql 5.1 had been released. Only its upcoming release was announced.

In a mail sent to the discussion forum on Sourceforge, Dhiren Patel announced IBM's decision to stop further development of SolidDB for Mysql, a product acquire with Solid, the companny developing it. Being released under the GPL, the community of users and developers will be able to continue the development, but without the involvement of IBM. Would this have something to do with Sun's acquisition of Mysql?

Sun announced an agreement to acquire Mysql AB, the company behind the popular open source database, in a transaction worth $1 billion, $800 million of it being cash, the rest being in options.

Until now Sun supported only Postgresql, but it will propose global enterprise support for the Mysql solutions rapidly.

WampServer 2, the news version of WAMP5, is now available and lets you easily run a development environment for Apache, Mysql and PHP on Windows. It features add-ons, that lets you add as much releases of Apache, Mysql and PHP as you need, and also includes PHPMyAdmin and SQLiteManager.

From Linuxfr.

SymmetricDS reached version 1.0 early november. It is a "web-enabled, database independent, data synchronization software. It uses web and database technologies to replicate tables between relational databases in near real time. The software was designed to scale for a large number of databases, work across low-bandwidth connections, and withstand periods of network outage.". Database triggers can be used for synchronisation, garanteeing atomicity of operations, but push and pull of data at intervals is also possible. Advanced features such as data filtering and re-routing are also available. Mysql and Oracle are supported out of the box, but other adapters can be developed.

As seen on The Server Side.

Mysql had acquired full commercial rights to develop and market SAP DB in may 2003, and subsequently renamed is MaxDB.

MaxDB is now returning to SAP, to "unify the product’s development, distribution and support under one organization", while Mysql will optimise their own database server for SAP. MaxDB is powering SAP Business ByDesign.

MaxDB was available under GPL with commercial options available (from SAP for SAP-related applications, from Mysql for others). There's no mention of the GPL license on SAP's MaxDB website , and it's not clear from their FAQ if they want to keep it under the GPL, and it doesn't seem they accept external contributions to the codebase. From their FAQ:

• Who owns MaxDB? That's SAP
• Who develops MaxDB? That's SAP. There's a group of 120 developers within SAP working on MaxDB, SAP liveCache technology and liveCache applications. There are no contributions from 3rd parties.

A new version of EnterpriseDB Postgres is now available from EnterpriseDB's Postgres Resource Center. This latest release contains a procedural language debugger, enabling users to debug code written in the plpgsql language. It supports step-by-step execution, watching and setting variable values, conditional breakpoints, inspecting the execution stack, all with a GUI for ease of use. The debugger was previously a proprietary component.

The mysql-to-postgresql migration tool, previously only available as a proprietary component of EnterpriseDB Advanced Server, is now released under the Artistic License, approved by the Open Source Initiative.

The Observatoire du Logiciel Libre published its latest report on the Free and Open Source software market in the enterprise, based on training organised for professionals. Although the conclusions cannot be considered as definitive because based on only one company providing trainings, the data unveiled can be used as one indicator of what is currently going on in the market.

The report is in french, but here are the trends comparing the first half of 2007 with the same period in 2006:

• The number of people trained rose 20%. The LAMP stack is still very popular, but the growth of Linux training slowed (+1% only), and the report attributed this to the arrival of Windows Server 2003.
• the trainings delivered become broader, becoming less technical, with for example trainings for SugarCRM and Jaspersoft's reporting solutions.
• Mysql, part of the LAMP stack, keeps growing with 40% more people trained
• Java is still popular, with a progression 66% more people trained
• Postgresql trainings number is stable. Postgresql seems to be used in more established companies and by specialists, relying on its most advanced features like PostGIS.
• the number of trainings delivered about OpenOffice stumbled by 80%. The report mentions that a lot of companies a getting OpenOffice directly, without trainings.

The last point would be worth further investigation: are companies really interestedin OpenOffice without trainings? Or do they have internal experts who deliver training inside the company?

Source: Toolinux

Mysql was since 10 months available in two flavours: Community and Enterprise editions. The source code tarballs for the enterprise edition will only be available to paying customers, though the source will stay available through BitKeeper. It'll be interesting to see the evolution of the two versions.