I was contacted by Doug Henschen on Monday for an article he was writing for Intelligent Enterprise on Oracle’s just announced promises to the European Commission regarding MySQL. It turns out Doug was polling all the major open source data warehousing and business intelligence vendors to get our perspectives on the promises, and it appears as if we all had roughly the same response: “cautious optimism” as Doug put it.
Having invented the industry’s first SQL Chip that improves the performance and scalability of reporting and analytics for MySQL by 10x – 1000x, we have been keenly interested and aware of Oracle’s announced intent to acquire Sun, and along with it MySQL. While we have architected our product to work with other database management systems in the future, we chose MySQL because of its incredibly rapid adoption in the market (especially for high-growth web businesses), open storage engine API, and large and growing open source community and ecosystem of partners.
Now having production reference customers like Mamasource, LiveRail, MindSpark, and others running their operational systems on MySQL and reporting and analytics on MySQL-based Kickfire, we are even more focused on making sure the leading open source data base has a bright future. As such, we were very pleased to see Oracle promise to continue support of MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture and to a policy of non-assertion against third parties using the storage engine API. We believe this is in Kickfire’s and Kickfire’s customers and partners best interests, so we applaud the announcement.
Going forward, should the deal be consummated, we plan on submitting our name for a seat on the promised MySQL Storage Engine Vendor Advisory Board to insure our interests as well as our customers and partners interests continued to be met by Oracle.
Tags: Analytic Appliance, Bruce Armstrong, MySQL, Oracle, SQL chip, Sun Microsystems
