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Sun-MySQL: So far, so good


By Robert Mullins
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July 17, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 4)
Soon after the employees of Sweden-based MySQL learned that the company was being acquired by Sun Microsystems, they were asked which elements of MySQL’s corporate culture Sun should preserve. Their answers included the usual “diversity,” “collaboration” and “communication.” But one response stood out: "Singing ‘Helan går.’ ”

“Helan går” is to Swedes what “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” is to Americans: a silly drinking song that for MySQL has become a hallowed, though still silly, tradition. When 400 Sun and MySQL employees met in Orlando on Jan. 16 to announce the acquisition, MySQL employees serenaded their soon-to-be co-workers from Sun with “Helan går” as people from both companies downed shots of vodka. The event is posted on You Tube for posterity.

That bonding exercise set the tone for what has apparently been a smooth process of integrating MySQL’s 400 employees into the 32,000-person Sun work force, while maintaining the progress of work on forthcoming releases of the data management platform.

“We have had no allergic reaction,” declared Marten Mickos, the former MySQL CEO who is now senior vice president of Sun’s Database Group.

Now comes the hard work of making MySQL a competitive database management product that large, established businesses would want to buy, a goal that has proved elusive. Startups and Internet companies such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo love MySQL, but old-school financial services and healthcare enterprises with mission-critical systems are reluctant to trust it.

“I thought we would get to the large corporations on our own, but I must admit that it didn’t happen to us when we were a private company,” said Mickos.

The US$1 billion acquisition also brought MySQL quality assurance resources that were sorely needed. MySQL 5.0, introduced in 2005, was plagued by bugs, and the company was slow to fix many of them, Mickos said. Post-acquisition, 65 Sun engineers joined about 150 MySQL engineers in putting what should have been the finishing touches on MySQL 5.1. But new bugs found in June forced a postponement of the release, which had been scheduled for the end of that month. A production release was expected to ship before Aug. 1, said Zack Urlocker, a MySQL transplant and now vice president for MySQL products at Sun.


Related Search Term(s): Databases, open source, Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, Sun

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