open strategy to the next level."
Growth on the Web
Both companies also are betting that the next generation of emerging, fast-growing companies will be more open to open source than traditional enterprises.
"In the old client/server world, you have DB2 or Oracle on a server running payroll, or accounting, or other financial applications," says Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL. "But accounting doesn't grow. On the Web, everything grows. That's the main difference here."
And that requires a different, more modern database, he says. "MySQL is unique in that we are the only significant relational database designed for the Internet, to save data to Web pages," says Mickos. "All the others were designed before the Internet, for offline applications."
Sun's global tech and customer support, and its fat R&D budget, are just what MySQL needs to penetrate the large-company market, says Noel Yuhanna, principal analyst with Forrester Research. "They've done very well in the small-medium business market, and with smaller database applications," he says. "The larger enterprise is where the problem was: People were concerned about the long-term viability of MySQL."
MySQL also fits into Sun's corporate culture around open source, where both companies are often the primary or only contributors to, and controllers of, the core of the open code base.
"They've written every line of code to their database," says Bruce Momjian, senior database architect with EnterpriseDB, a New Jersey database company whose rival product is built on the PostgreSQL open source code. He's also one of the Core Team members for the PostgreSQL project. "[For MySQL] open source is a way to distribute their database to the growing open source community and gain significant market share," he says.
EnterpriseDB released a beta version of its Advanced Server 8.3 in November.
MySQL's source code is licensed in two ways. Under the GNU General Public License (GPL), users can download it, change it, and never pay the company a dime. But if MySQL is incorporated into a product, users have to choose the commercial license. Cisco is a commercial licensee, running MySQL in several of its products, including its network intrusion-detection software. Any changes Cisco engineers make to the source code remain Cisco's property, and a distinguishing feature of its product.
By contrast, PostgreSQL uses the Berkeley license, under which the database code is not owned by anyone, and the development community organizes, schedules, and executes enhancements and additions.
Sun itself has a PostgreSQL development team, as well as a Java open source database project. Both will continue to be offered and actively supported, says Sun's Green, because they all fulfill different purposes and satisfy different user needs. "PostgreSQL is focused on high-end database features for applications like large data warehouses," says Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL Lead at Sun.
Big competition
On the business front, the acquisition moves Sun and MySQL squarely into competition with Microsoft's SQL Server 2005, says Josh Farina, analyst with Technology Business Research (TBR). "TBR believes Microsoft has taken [market] share away from the open source databases at the departmental or small-business level," he says. "Microsoft's out-of-the-box integration with other pieces of the Microsoft stack is a strong differentiator."
For Sun's billion-dollar gamble to pay off, it will have to maintain and strengthen ties with the open source community and tie the MySQL database ever more tightly into the emerging open source software framework for the Web.
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