Thoughts from MySQL Conf, Oracle’s Acquisition of Sun, and Meeting New People
I attended MySQL Conf, and it’s been an neat conference. The most surprising thing was the news was the purchase of Sun by Oracle. This sounds to me like a play for a solid vertically integrated market for Oracle. I can appreciate that — they get Sun’s hardware and OS skills, they bring their own DB services to the table, and they get a lot of community with MySQL.
Lots of people have spoken about their fears that Oracle will suffocate MySQL, but I don’t think they’ll do that. I think that Oracle realizes how centrally important to the web community that MySQL is. I do think they’ll try to sell Oracle to high-volume MySQL sites, and that makes sense. And I think they’ll continue MySQL to bring DB share under the Oracle roof.
MySQL is hugely popular, it wouldn’t make any sense to throw away that good will.
Other things from the conference have been that I’ve run into people I haven’t seen in a while, and I’m learning things.
One of the most interesting talks I went to was Rockyou’s talk about how they built their federated platform for supporting their Facebook applications. Very neat to see their approach, especially since we’re buidling our own sort of Facebook applications, specifically Bejeweled Blitz. Good times.
I met the photographer called Julian Cash, a very nice guy located in San Francisco. He did a light painting portrait of me, which was fun. We talked about various things for a while, and he talked to me about his project that he’s working on. More to come later.
Today is the last day. Things are winding down, and I’m preparing to go home.
