MySQL AB
The Swedish company MySQL AB was acquired by Sun Microsystems in February 2008. It turned products and services in the area of database systems. She was especially known for the database management system MySQL server. The system is now being offered by the Oracle Corporation, both as free software ( under the GPL ), as well as under a commercial license. The GPL version has - as usual - no warranty or support, while the commercial version is equipped with comprehensive warranty.
History
The SQL database engine MySQL was founded in 1994 by the Finnish developer Michael " Monty" Widenius as further development of a proprietary ISAM Engine for personal use for the Swedish consulting company TcX AB, which he, along with his Swedish fellow students David Axmark and Alan Larsson after completing her studies at had established technical University of Helsinki, created.
At the urging of Axmark, who had met the late 1980s, Richard Stallman and was very impressed by his ideas and concepts, MySQL has been designed from the outset as a FOSS solution. MySQL with more than 6 million installations and over 35,000 downloads per day, the most popular open source database management system in the world.
The company MySQL AB ( "AB" Swedish for Aktiengesellschaft) established to deal better with the help of venture capital to market demands by the three founders. Widenius and Axmark then switched from TcX AB for MySQL AB.
From the beginning, the two had the intention to earn money with this project. The concept of " dual license" is represented by MySQL AB very offensive and is considered a model for other open source projects such as Berkeley DB. The developers of MySQL AB were like regular employees out. The product MySQL is therefore not a work of volunteers, but by salaried programmers. The staff were scattered all over the world and communicate by e -mail, IRC and phone and sometimes in person at company meetings or conferences. MySQL AB was a virtual company in this sense, but it also maintained several locations worldwide ( eg Uppsala in Sweden, Cupertino in the U.S. or Munich in Germany ), where the employees - are employed - as in other enterprises usual. Since March 2007, however, there is the MySQL Quality Contribution Program, which promotes the initial treatment of external corrections and features active.
In May 2003, took over the MySQL database activities of SAP. The SAP DB database has been renamed to MaxDB and was offered as a second product from MySQL AB. MaxDB is SAP/R3-zertifiziert. Cooperation with SAP was stopped again in October 2007, the database from Release 7.7 renamed in SAP MaxDB.
In October 2003, MySQL AB announced the acquisition of the company Alzato, an association founded in 2000 offshoot of the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson. With it, MySQL AB took over the development team and the rights to their product NDB Cluster, MySQL AB was incorporated in the following in the MySQL server as the MySQL Cluster.
On 7 October 2005 the company announced Oracle buying InnoDB Oy, the company that developed the MySQL storage engine InnoDB. In a press statement on the acquisition of InnoDB Oracle had announced that the contracts between InnoDB and MySQL AB Oy expire in 2006 and would have to be renegotiated, which caused many users to uncertainty. The purchase was justified by strengthening its commitment to open- source region.
In April 2006, MySQL AB announced in a press statement that InnoDB and MySQL Oy have agreed on a multi-year extension of the existing contracts. In the same communication MySQL AB also announced the development of its own transactional storage engine, code-named "Falcon". This is being developed under the leadership of Jim Starkey, whose company Netfrastructure was acquired in February 2006 for MySQL AB. Starkey is known in the database scene, including through the development of the database InterBase and its participation in the open source Firebird database project. Falcon is not based on the code base Firebird.
On January 16, 2008 MySQL AB has announced that it has agreed to a takeover offer of the company Sun Microsystems. The offer amounted to one billion U.S. dollars. The acquisition was completed in February 2008.