Wednesday, January 2, 2008

2007 - MySQL a Year in Review

2007 has been an interesting year with MySQL. MySQL really seems to have broken out this year. Organizations are absolutely choking on their database and software licensing costs. More and more organizations, large and small are now recognizing MySQL databases as a viable solution for database projects.

If MySQL can be a solution for a database project, it can provide a lot of flexibility for organizations. Leading managers are looking at more ways to be competitive in today's global markets. A number of the largest Internet websites are using MySQL to provide extremely fast reliable Internet solutions. These success stories have more IT managers asking what MySQL can do for them. A great success story can be found at:
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3299.html

In 2007, more than any year open source solutions have taken an exponential leap in use and acceptance in the market place. In the last year I've gone into some of the largest companies in the U.S. and seen an explosion of MySQL databases. In 2008, I expect to see the growth of open source solutions increase in use and acceptance. My top three reasons I see a significant increase in MySQL databases for 2008:
  1. IT managers beginning to think out of the box and realizing how open source can offer greater flexibility in choosing software solutions.
  2. Industry acceptance of open source solutions in the enterprise.
  3. Popularity of MySQL version 5 features.
The large vendors can no longer ignore the growing popularity of open source and MySQL. 2007 has seen large vendor companies purchasing open source products. It's funny, I've seen a few blogs predict gloom and doom for MySQL because Oracle purchased InnoDB and IBM purchased SolidDB. I see the exact opposite. The purchases of popular storage engines used by MySQL shows the growing popularity and use of MySQL can not be ignored by large vendor companies. Their purchases bring more light and industry awareness of popular storage engines used by MySQL.

I predict InnoDB and SolidDB storage engines will be used more than ever in MySQL databases. As MySQL 6.0 moves towards GA, you will see the Falcon storage engine increase in interest and popularity with it being the next generation in transactional storage engines for MySQL.

The growth of open source is going to be very interesting to watch in 2008. As Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, BEA, etc. add more and more features to their products and increase their prices, open source products grow in popularity and marketshare at almost the same pace. The growth of MySpace, YouTube, MySQL, etc. is continuing to demonstrate the incredible dynamics of the Internet and how the use of open source is continuing to change our IT industry. I don't work with all open source products but the following are products I work with and see them becoming more popular than ever before. Popular open source solutions that I predict will continue to grow in 2008 include:
  • MySQL
  • Apache
  • Apache Tomcat
  • JBoss
  • Eclipse
  • Spring

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