Open database alliance reaches takeoff stage

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 22 October 2009 07:32

Opinion and Analysis

MySQL co-founder Ulf Michael Widenius's dream of having a fully-fledged Open Database Alliance is slowly reaching fruition with the announcement that the project, begun in May this year, has reached its second stage.
This means the project now has more formal structures in place, including all the legal necessities, according to an announcement by Widenius, who is better known as Monty in the FOSS community.

Widenius, who founded MySQL, the most widely used open source database, with David Axmark and Allan Larsson, sold the company to Sun Microsystems last year. It did not prove the best fit and Widenius, who had joined Sun after the acquisition, quit Sun in February this year.

He then set up MariaDB, named after his daughter, as a community project and later formed Monty Program AB to provide engineering services for the MySQL codebase.

A fork of the MySQL codebase by Brian Aker has produced Drizzle, a stripped down, faster implementation than its parent.

Oracle's acquisition of Sun a few months back , is facing an antitrust probe in Europe; regulators are not happy that a company which owns the predominant proprietary database should also own the open source database with the biggest marketshare and want to assure themselves that the development of MySQL will continue apace.

In his announcement, Monty said the alliance was meant for all FOSS database technologies and businesses based on them.

He said that an interim board had been set up, comprising Patrik Backman of OpenOcean, consultant Georg Greve (vice-chair and secretary), Australia's Arjen Lentz who runs Open Query,  and Peter Zaitsev of  Percona. Monty, representing Monty Program AB, is the chairman.

This group would guide the project towards becoming a fully operational alliance. The process would involve internal discussions to identify areas of activity to focus on from 2010 onwards.

Some of the questions which could be discussed, according to Monty, are: "Which are the most pressing challenges to the Free & Open Database World? The initial impulse may have come from the MariaDB ecosystem, but which database technologies should the ODBA focus on? Which are the most pressing challenges for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, ZopeDB, BlackRay or whichever other database might choose to join the ODBA?"

In a sense, the alliance is one way of Monty's taking back the reins and directing the future of MySQL, though under somewhat changed circumstances. The open source application was never the best fit for a proprietary company like Sun and is unlikely to remain at Oracle, with a divestment to a third party now looking increasingly likely.