What is MySQL?

It's been an incredible journey coming from the Oracle world (which I love) and having the privilege of joining MySQL and watching MySQL be on the verge of going public and then being part of the Sun acquisition and now watching the Oracle acquisition move forward. To say its been one of the richest experiences in my professional career would be an understatement.

Which makes me think, what is MySQL? If you asked 20 different people you would get 20 different answers. Some of the most common I believe would be:

• A small open source company that wanted to disrupt the IT industry and did!
• A company with incredible leadership that had a vision that every single employee was committed and dedicated to that vision.
• A free open source database that helped redefine the database industry.
• A very successful database product that has incredible scale out capability that leverages open source and the LAMP stack.
• A product that opened up more options for organizations during a time of an economic down turn.

Today and twenty years from now, when I think of MySQL I do not just think of a database software product that has disrupted the IT industry. I think of:

• A culture based on sharing, teamwork, commitment to a vision and love of open source.
• A community that is entirely team based with an incredible sense of loyalty to each other and the goals defined by the leadership.
• A leadership team that believed in speaking to the employees and not at them.
• An environment built on empowering individuals to make the sum greater than the parts.
• The incredible dedication and selflessness of the employees.
• An environment that cultivated incredible talent and was able to define a vision that people believe in.
  

The spirit, dedication, belief in the vision and camaraderie is as strong in the MySQL community as it was over a year and a half when I joined MySQL. The culture, Qua, karma, kismit or what ever you want to call it, is I believe growing stronger.

I'm a big reader of business books and I believe we will see some successful business books on the MySQL story. Yet if these books talk about the MySQL success story or the MySQL product they will be capturing a small part of what MySQL is. To me, the MySQL story has to include the vision, the incredible culture and the unique group of people that have come together to disrupt the IT industry.

I write this blog entry because I always find it interesting the people that like to tear down our heroes, spread Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) and scare people with worse case scenarios. I on the other hand believe we should believe its okay to have heroes, believe that good things can happen and never underestimate what individuals that believe in a vision can accomplish.

Best Environments for Running MySQL

Its interesting when you look at MySQL database environments. Extremely popular in the MySQL world is to use commodity hardware and implement the LAMP stack.  Smaller projects and startup companies love this environment.  A simple example, a company needs to set up a web application, they buy some commodity hardware, set up replication and scale horizontally.  Everybody loves this and it works great.

This environment requires floor space, cooling, electrical outlets, etc.  As new MySQL database servers get built, the environment needs to consider how this database environment will scale.  Organizations may take a step back and start looking at scaling with blade servers or large host systems to run large numbers of MySQL databases.

Database servers are I/O intensive.  Growing with cheap disks does not always scale with systems that have large I/O requirements.  Striping and mirroring starts to become more important.  So storage scalability and more expensive storage solutions become a consideration as I/O increases.

It will be interesting as Sun leads MySQL into more enterprise environments how the hardware and scalability strategies will evolve.

MySQL in the Enterprise

In the last few months MySQL has taken serious steps to have it play a larger role in the enterprise. For MySQL to take the next steps the following needs to occur on the technology side:

• Help customers understand the scalability of MySQL.
  
• MySQL needs to expand in the small to medium size data warehouse market. MySQL excels on delivering large volumes of Internet content at high speed. High read rates are what you need to make a data warehouse work. Using MySQL replication, organizations can scale horizontally at inexpensive incremental rates.
  
• MySQL needs an inexpensive striping and mirroring storage strategy to help organizations that can't afford an expensive EMC or Veritas solution. Hmmm, I wonder if there is a company out there who could help MySQL's storage strategy? :-)
  
• Organizations need to realize there are commercial open source solutions like Pentaho that can deliver business solutions, BI and reporting capabilities in the small and medium sized database environments. There are open source commercial solutions that can help MySQL environments deliver medium sized enterprise solutions. Saving 6 and 7 figures on licensing of software can provide a lot of flexibility in terms of hardware and software options.
  
• Organizations new to MySQL need a better understanding of how OS snapshots and InnoDB Hot Backup can be used to provide hot backups in OLTP environments.
• More MySQL DBAs that have an enterprise perspective. Oracle DBAs are the perfect source. Too many organizations look at MySQL and do not understand how to set it up properly to leverage what it can do.
  
• Organizations like Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Flicker, etc. know how to build highly scalable MySQL environments. Products like Memcache can greatly benefit MySQL scalability. Scaling MySQL is still a skill not known to a lot of companies.
  
• MySQL and industry analysts need more bench marks on exactly where MySQL reaches it's limit on the OLTP side. The knowledgeable industry expert understands MySQL has proven to deliver high read rates. For customers to feel comfortable using MySQL in more OLTP environments, customers need to understand where MySQL tops out on the OLTP side.