Oracle buys Innobase

This morning Oracle announced the acquisition of open source software company Innobase. As we expand our commitment to open source software beyond Linux, this is a good/strategic move for Oracle. Innobase has long been an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) for MySQL. InnoDB was distributed under a GPL license as part of MySQL Pro.

Essentially InnoDB is a table type in MySQL which offers several key advantages such as:

• InnoDB tables are transactional: they provide rollback and commit capabilities.
• InnoDB is the only table type in MySQL which supports foreign key constraints.
• InnoDB tables are fast, even faster than
• InnoDB tables have row level locking: they allow higher concurrency
• InnoDB tables provide an Oracle-style consistent read, also known as multiversioned concurrency control.
• There is a hot backup tool available for InnoDB, which allows users to make backups of a running database
• Multiversioning also allows you to dump tables from your database with SELECT INTO OUTFILE without setting locks on the tables
• InnoDB tables have automatic crash recovery

Charles Rozwat, Oracle's Executive Vice President in charge of Database and Middleware Technology asserted that Oracle intends to continue developing the InnoDB technology and expand its commitment to open source software. It'll be interesting to see how this affects MySQL. Stay tuned!

Sun and Google vs. M$FT?

I can't wait to hear what Google and Sun are going to announce at this news conference. Sun's President Jonathan Schwartz posted in his blog a bunch of hints. For example he said: "If I were a betting man, I'd bet the world was about to change." And he talked about what had just happened in Massachusetts. He also said that in his last keynote he asked the audience if they'd rather give up their browser or their desktop and they "Unanimously, they'd all give up the latter without a blink."

In this article, Tim Bray says that OpenDocument will turn everything inside out.

So if I were a betting man, I'd say that Sun and Google are going to try to hurt their common enemy (Microsoft) by innovating around accessing Office-like functionality from the browser using open standards. This would probably leverage Open Office suite/expertise and Google's expertise in delivering rich-client/sophisticated/AJAX apps on thin clients at an acceptable and sometimes amazing performance.

So don't miss the new conference!

[Update] It turns out the deal seems to cover more aspects than I had anticipated. Sun also plans to distribute the Google Toolbar with Java and Google will buy lots more Sun servers. For more on this story/partnership check out this page.