sql

In Friday's podcast, MySQL founder says goodbye to Sun, Google recruits a whole army of white-space soldiers, and Lenovo says it will focus more heavily on selling PCs in China. Also, what's Sega up to with its patent filings? And the Senate might cut funding for broadband while trying to slim down the stimulus package.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Today's stories:

Marten Mickos to leave Sun in reorg

Google helps form 'white space' database coalition

Lenovo to refocus on Chinese market

Courts split over police searches of handhelds

Is Sega planning a return to the console market?… Read more

Marten Mickos, former MySQL chief executive and current senior vice president of Sun Microsystems' database group, is transitioning out of the company in a planned reorganization.

I reached Mickos this morning for confirmation: he is definitely leaving. This move is not prompted by weakness in MySQL's business, which just closed an exceptional quarter, as he told me by phone.

"There is nothing in the MySQL business that is prompting me to leave," Mickos said. "Business is great. We just closed a multimillion-dollar deal recently that confirms much of the momentum we've made. We just closed … Read more

It's official: Michael "Monty" Widenius has officially quit his job at Sun Microsystems, as noted on his blog, and will be starting his own company.

I reported in September that Widenius, primary author of the original MySQL database and one of MySQL's founders, had left, which proved to be almost true. He was leaving, but he didn't quite make it out the door.

As of Wednesday, he's gone.

The reason isn't any different from what prompted him to move toward the exit door in September, as he notes on his blog: Widenius feels … Read more

As the chief open-source officer at Sun Microsystems, Simon Phipps spoke to ZDNet Australia about the MySQL acquisition and community engagement on OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris.

Q: In the beginning of 2008, Sun spent $1 billion on the acquisition of MySQL. Given Sun's huge reduction in Australian revenue, and the global shedding of jobs, was this a prudent acquisition? Phipps: It's a bit soon to be making that sort of judgment. Asking that question now is a bit like asking a company to change its product strategy on the basis of the share price.

MySQL is a long-term … Read more

While Sun Microsystems' MySQL gets the limelight, with its 55 percent quarterly billings increase, other open-source database competitors like Ingres and Enterprise are also doing well.

Ingres on Tuesday reported a significant uptick in its 2008 revenue, climbing 32 percent to $68 million over $52 million in 2007. EnterpriseDB didn't provide revenue numbers, but it also recently reported a banner year, with greater than 50 percent growth in new customer accounts and "comparable bookings growth."

New Ingres customers in 2008 include Air Enterprises, Allied Express, Banca IFIS SpA, BBP Partners, CondeNast Publications, Connected Wedding, C&K … Read more

Perhaps you didn't notice, but 2008 marked the last year when SourceForge downloads mattered.

Throughout the year, and for a consistent period of several months, the statistics function on SourceForge stopped working. My own company, which had been tracking our downloads closely, suddenly was flying blindly.

Guess what? Life went on. Not only that, but we moved our central downloads repository to our own Web site because we needed consistency that SourceForge apparently couldn't give us. It also became obvious that download tallies were secondary to something SourceForge never gave us: insight into those downloading our software.

The … Read more

More than half of the security vulnerabilities disclosed during 2008 had no patches available from the vendor by the end of the year, according to a report released on Monday by IBM's X-Force research group.

Meanwhile, 46 percent of vulnerabilities from 2006 and 44 percent from 2007 still had no patch by the end of 2008, the 2008 X-Force Trend and Risk report said. X-Force documented a record number of 7,406 new vulnerabilities last year.

Overall, Microsoft is the vendor that tops the list in percentage of vulnerabilities disclosed, the report said. The Macintosh and base Linux kernel … Read more

Perhaps Sun Microsystems' valuation of MySQL wasn't too far off. Sun acquired the open-source database leader in January 2008 for a whopping $1 billion, a sum that many rational people thought was way too high.

Perhaps they were wrong; $1 billion is beginning to look like a bargain.

Sun's quarterly earnings report for MySQL suggests that the company brought in $81 million in billings for the second quarter of 2009, a 55 percent jump over the $52 million in sales it did during the first quarter.

That is phenomenal growth, and it puts MySQL on a fast track … Read more

Sun Microsystems is getting some love from Wall Street after its sales and earnings topped estimates, as detailed by Bloomberg. Software sales jumped 21 percent year-over-year.

What is fueling the growth? The same thing that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has doggedly said would lift Sun's fortunes again: open source.

Open source has powered Sun's resurgence in several ways. First, open source makes Sun interesting and relevant again to IT buyers. Sun is shedding its image as the high-cost, high-performance leader to the low-cost, high-performance leader.

Second, Sun's open-source products are starting to contribute real dollars to sales … Read more