MySQL's Marten Mickos ushers in the New Year by looking back on the old one
Marten Mickos sent me an update on MySQL's exceptional 2007. It makes interesting points about open source, generally, while relaying important information about MySQL. Here are excerpts from the message, with his permission:
In 2007 we continued to make free and open source software available and affordable to all. MySQL version 5 was our top download hit, expanding the universe of MySQL users further into the Web2.0 and Enterprise2.0 markets. MySQL Proxy, experimentally released in 2007, garnered the attention of scale-out experts worldwide.
Our commercial offering MySQL Enterprise was significantly upgraded with improved monitoring and other services, and we launched MySQL Cluster Carrier-Grade Edition for the most demanding telecom uses. To expand our global reach, we opened a strong APAC office in Tokyo in early 2007.
What did we learn in 2007?
Whereas several years ago Linux marched into the enterprise as an enabler of the switch to commodity hardware platforms, the rest of the LAMP stack (and the entire open source ecosystem) is currently marching into the enterprise as an enabler of web-based architectures for business applications and services.
MySQL is seen by customers as a great complement and expansion path to existing proprietary DBMS solutions. A study by the Independent Oracle User Group revealed that about a third of Oracle users also have MySQL in production.
Scale, and especially scale-out, is critical to the leaders in the Web2.0 and Enterprise2.0 spaces. Facebook, Second Life, Wikipedia, to name a few, are constantly pushing the limits of scalability. These companies scale out with MySQL using a combination of replication, partitioning, load balancing, caching and other techniques.
The online world is growing rapidly. By online we mean not just web properties and Web2.0 start-ups, but also Software as a Service (SaaS), modern enterprise applications (Enterprise2.0), security and other appliances, and mobile phone networks.
As we move into 2008, we will continue to focus on the online world, combining in an architecture of participation innovations from all over the MySQL ecosystem with those of our own.
And a happy New Year to all!
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
