Sun Acquires MySQL For $1 Billion

Wednesday, January 16. 2008

Sun Acquires MySQL For $1 Billion

There was a time that Sun Microsytems was closely engaged in the GIS and LBS marketplaces selling workstations running Solaris-based solutions. Not so much anymore. MySQL supports spatial datatypes but they don't actively participate in the growth of the open source geospatial market like other open source solutions though many implementations exist. My attempts to contact them have always been rebuffed leading me to conclude that "spatial is not special" to them.

Now comes word that Sun is buying MySQL. Sun has always pushed open source technology and now they have the "M" in the "LAMP" according to the press release, referring to Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl that is driving Web 2.0 initiatives. Don't expect Sun to all of a sudden become a force in the spatial business but they now have a very solid foundation to support the open source geospatial community if they wanted to.

Posted by Joe Francica in Open Source, LBS at 08:09 | Comments (2)

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I wonder if SUN will put resources into beefing up DB_Linq, perhaps even exposing spatial types?
http://code2code.net/DB_Linq/index.html

#1 Kirk (Link) on 2008-01-16 10:00 (Reply)

It is true that MySQL don't actively promote spatial per se. However, it is not true that it is not important to them. http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/GIS_Functions They have recently implemented proper intersection and contains spatial functions, ie, non-mbr based, as well as buffers, unions, sym_differences, etc. I have posted 3 bugs relating to this beta, all of which have been fixed within a few days.

MySQL has been growing very fast and has been putting a lot of effort into making MySQL an enterprise level database. As such a lot of effort has recently gone into clustering, replication, stored procedures and other important features that were lacking when compared to Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, etc.

In my opinion the merger with Sun is excellent news for MySQL (and Sun), as it will provide strong corporate/financial backing without losing the open source community contributions that have made MySQL grow so rapidly in the first place.

#2 John Powell on 2008-01-18 02:22 (Reply)

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Sun Acquires MySQL For $1 Billion

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