Oracle wins 'Acquirer of the Year' award at MySQL Conference

MySQL and Oracle continue to co-exist in the enterprise

It was a standing room only crowd at the MySQL Conference and Expo this morning in Santa Clara. With more than 2,000 attendees, this is the largest crowd the conference has ever drawn, which is saying something given that most conferences are projecting much lower numbers with the economic downturn. Perhaps open source is counter-cyclical after all and will continue to do well in tough times. And maybe a few more people wanted to see what was on tap given Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems announced on Monday.

Karen Padir, who runs the overall MySQL Middleware group at Sun highlighted some of the recent innovations benefiting from the collaboration between Sun's systems Engineers and the MySQL software team that have resulted in significant gains in performance and scalability:

• New MySQL Cluster 7.0 -- delivering four-fold scalability on multicore servers
• New MySQL 5.4 -- scaling on 16-way x86, 64-way CMT servers with 90 percent faster response times

Karen also invited Dr DBA, Ken Jacobs from Oracle, to come up on stage and talk about the longtime collaboration between Oracle and MySQL. I've gotten to know Ken over the years and he is a straight shooter and kept his word on keeping InnoDB open and evolving. Ken highlighted several additional performance enhancements coming from Oracle and the open source community that will make their way into MySQL 5.4 in the coming weeks and months. While there's some speculation about what Oracle's acquisition of MySQL might mean, I think it will be good overall. Oracle understands the importance of open source and how to build great database products.

MySQL isn't the perfect solution for all database problems -- and neither is Oracle.  The reality is that MySQL and Oracle coexist in many organizations.  A study done by the IOUG (International Oracle User Group) highlighted this fact when its study (PDF) showed that a third of Oracle shops had MySQL in production, side-by-side with their Oracle databases. And one great benefit of Oracle acquiring Sun is that the InnoDB and MySQL teams will be together in one organization for the first time ever.