MySQL’s Mickos: Open Source in the Enterprise

November 17, 2006
By

James Maguire

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Q: What about the new Enterprise version MySQL?

It’s our first [enterprise version]. It was launched a month ago. The initial reactions have been very positive. But note here that we launched the Enterprise version with [release] 5.28, which is a new version, but it was not a major new feature release. And the monitoring service that we discussed earlier is as a release candidate so it will come out as GA in about one month.

Marten Mickos, MySQL CEO Email Article Print Article Comment on this article Share Articles Digg del.icio.us Newsvine Facebook Google LinkedIn MySpace Reddit Slashdot StumbleUpon Technorati Twitter Windows Live YahooBuzz FriendFeed

So the announcement happened a month ago, the product was immediately available, but in typical open source fashion we add new functionality all the time. It’s ‘release early, release often.’ We don’t sit and wait it for it, to make some big bang announcement.

Q; What does MySQL have planned for 2007?

It will be the growth into the modern enterprise. And I say ‘modern’ specifically to show that we are not trying to get the migration deals from Oracle. We’re trying to get the new applications that are being deployed. And that’s the part that is growing much more rapidly than anything else.

And we just won a big deal in Sweden. The Swedish police decided to build all their new applications on Linux, JBoss and MySQL.

Q: What will your main focus be in the years ahead?

We think we are powering the new online world. And we learned this trade in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, but it stretches into the enterprise today. So it’s online in terms of data marts, it’s online in terms of departmental, data warehousing, and e-commerce. And it’s online in terms of telephony and telecom applications. So that’s our focus very much.

We just see that with one billion people on the Internet today, and companies being more and more Internet-enabled, that’s where the big, big growth will be.

Q: So the new growth will be powering the online world. In your view, is this a different world than the enterprise world?

I think there will be an old part of the enterprise world that refuses to see the new stuff and they will continue to run on mainframes and old Oracle databases. But the new ones are the ones being built now that follow the new scale-out architecture and service-oriented architecture, and they will run on us.

Q: What are the challenges for MySQL?

For a growth company it’s important to stay focused and just have your internal things in shape. Just managing growth – to focus the organization, keep it running very fast, and fix the problems quickly. There are always things that go wrong and then you need to fix them quickly.

I don’t want to sound too arrogant or anything, but I think out in the marketplace we’re just enormously popular. We have so many passionate customers who are just loving this.

How many complaints per year do I get elevated to me? I think I’ve had four this year – four customers who’ve had situations they had to raise to my level. And with millions of users I think it’s just amazing how well we’ve been able to serve them.

And keeping up with that takes a lot of internal work. We have a fantastic support team and we need to make sure they have the training and the manpower they need. And all that happens behind the scenes, but that’s what we’ve been spending a lot of time on.

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