MySQL Prepares To Go Public

prostoalex writes "MySQL CEO Marten Mickos told Computer Business Review the company plans to go public: 'Now entering its twelfth year, the company has built up just less than 10,000 paying customers, and an installed base estimated to be close to 10 million... When it does go public, MySQL will be one of only a handful of open source vendors to do so. Red Hat, VA Linux (now VA Software), and Caldera (now SCO Group) led the way in 1999 and 2000...'"

Comments

Re:Oracle aquisition

[timmarhy]

won't matter if they do, someone will fork the GPL version. ah the beauty of gpl. companys can totally fuck up a product and we will still get to use it as we please.

Re:10,000 customers?

[martenmickos]

Thanks for the questions!

The customer count is over several years. Yes, the majority of our users choose not to pay. The current ratio is something like 1 in 1,000. But as you probably know as an open source user, there is great benefit to a project also from the ones who don't pay.

Those who pay do it for the value-add they receive: production support, scheduled binaries with only bug fixes, the monitoring and advisory servce, etc. From a business perspective the great thing is that the ratio of paid to non-paid is changing and our business is steadily growing.

We are proud at MySQL to build something that has great value to the FOSS communities and is a great business at the same time.

Sorry to hear that you don't like MySQL, but great to see that you nevertheless take time to read /. postings about us and to post your own. Let us know what "warts" you see in our product and help us improve it. Then perhaps one day you will find that it serves your needs.

Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB

Re:10,000 customers?

[slamb]

Sorry to hear that you don't like MySQL, but great to see that you nevertheless take time to read /. postings about us and to post your own. Let us know what "warts" you see in our product and help us improve it. Then perhaps one day you will find that it serves your needs.

I don't like that MySQL does not keep my data safely and securely out of the box. Some examples:

• I need to flip a whole set of knobs to make MySQL return failure on invalid data. Apparently TRADITIONAL, ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO, NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO, NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION, NO_UNSIGNED_SUBTRACTION, NO_ZERO_DATE, NO_ZERO_IN_DATE, ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY, and STRICT_ALL_TABLES. No other RDBMS even has these knobs, much less has the defaults wrong.
• There's no way (that I can find) to completely turn off non-transactional tables. As I understand it, if I forget to tell it when creating a table to make it transactional, it's silently not. If a transaction involves even a single non-transactional table, the whole thing is non-transactional. This makes me nervous.
• I don't know if it does an fdatasync() at the right times out of the box on all table types. I need ACID, not doubt.
• When users have no password set, anyone can connect without a password. Contrast to PostgreSQL: no one connects without authentication unless you explicitly say so in the configuration file. But it's unobtrusive because local users can authenticate via Unix domain sockets / SO_PASSCRED.

I can't take MySQL seriously until this changes. I understand that you have backward compatibility concerns, but that's life - you pay a price for the poor decisions you've made in the past. You might have to go through a long deprecation period before you can get rid of these knobs. At the very least, don't have them flipped this way unless I start mysqld with the --treat-my-data-as-garbage command-line option.

If you fix this fundamental problem, I'll be impressed. I may not use your product, but I will stop laughing at it.