TechPulse 360

MySQL new boss, Karen Tegan Padir hopes the open source community will help the company innovate

Despite trouble times at both MySQL – which lost its founders – and Sun (sold to Oracle), more developers (2,000 according to the organisers) made the journey to Santa Clara, Calif. to attend the MySQL conference this year than ever.

At the show, Karen Tegan Padir, the open source database’s new boss, unveiled a beta version of the database engine, as well as a more “community” friendly vision.

MySQL’s innovation comes from open source community

MySQL 5.4 performance improvements mostly came from “patches” written by Google and Oracle – through its InnoDB open source team – and added to the source tree of the open source database.

“For every 4 times increase in processing power, MySQL gets 3 times the throughput. It’s not perfectly linear, but it’s a lot closer. On the benchmarks we see on average 60 to 70 percent performance gain… and that’s without changing anything on the application,” explains Sun’s vice president of Software Infrastructure Marketing, Mark Herring.

MySQL wants to reengage with its fans

But the main emphasis for MySQL this week is to show the open source world that it is now more community friendly by:

1. trying to get patches from the community into the main source tree;
2. changing the way it accepts contributions, letting developers keep ownership of their source code’s copyright;
3. releasing a monthly update for the software source code to the community.

“This is the key to our success. We have to be more inclusive because innovation happens everywhere,” said Herring.

Here’s a video excerpt of my conversation with Sun’s vice president of Software Infrastructure Marketing, Mark Herring on the open source company announcements today: