James Gosling grades Oracle’s handling of Sun’s technology

Posted by Bill Bradford on Jan 14, 2014

In this InfoWorld article, Java founder James Gosling rates Oracle’s handling of Sun’s technologies in the four years since the acquisition.

In short, Java gets a passing grade, while the treatment of the Solaris operating system fails miserably.

Oracle increasing MySQL Support Costs

Posted by Bill Bradford on Oct 8, 2010

According to this Register article, Oracle will be eliminating the Basic and Silver support options for MySQL (unless customers lock themselves into a 3-year contract now) and increasing prices on the remaining options.

This blog post has more thoughts on the matter from someone involved with the Postgresql side of things.

Personally, I think this is turning into a textbook example of how to buy a company, and then shoot yourself in the foot and drive away customers. Oracle’s “We’re the phone company, we don’t have to care”-type attitude may work with its Oracle database, but it certainly won’t work with smaller markets like MySQL (which has a perfectly free competitor in Postgresql) or the Solaris OS.

Sun’s “Project Peter”

Posted by Bill Bradford on Oct 13, 2009

WikiLeaks has published some details about a “Project Peter” that was at one time in development at Sun to facilitate migrations from Oracle to MySQL for some customers.

Short interview with MySQL Founder

Posted by Bill Bradford on Feb 9, 2009

This article at OpenSourceReleaseFeed talks with Michael Widenius about his recent departure from Sun and his plans for the future.

Wikimedia to use Sun servers and storage

Posted by Bill Bradford on Nov 21, 2008

Sun has announced that the WikiMedia Foundation will be using SunFire x4150 and x4500 servers along with StorageTek storage arrays to expand its infrastructure.

Update: Jonathan Schwartz has some thoughts on this announcement.

MySQL Founder Leaves Sun

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 5, 2008

According to this Valleywag article, Monty Widenus (the founder of MySQL) has left Sun.

Update: this post says that he may not have actually resigned yet, but is considering it.

Sun introduces MySQL Workbench

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 16, 2008

Sun has introduced MySQL Workbench, a visual database design and modeling tool. Currently available for Microsoft Windows, future releases are planned for Linux and Mac OS X.

The software is available in two versions – a free open source Community Edition, and a $99 commercial Standard Edition that includes support.

Sun releases MySQL 5.1

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 15, 2008

Sun has announced the release and pending general availability of MySQL 5.1, along with the MySQL Certified Storage Engine Program that enables storage engine developers to certify that their implementations have been tested and are compatible with MySQL.