Glyn Moody has an interesting piece on Why Patents are Like Black Holes where he looks at the situation when a large patent holder goes bankrupt - or is about to. His point is that even if a company otherwise can go out of business cleanly, the patents often remain as a piece of "IPR" that can come back and haunt us like a zombie.

Also Matt Asay recently weighed in on the subject:

I may or may not be interviewed on the Swedish language Radio Vega. The background to this confusing statement is that the Finnish government today publishes a report on the use of open source in Finnish companies and associated risks related to that. I was a contributor to the report since Monty Program is a Finnish open source company. I guess since I speak Swedish, the reporter had scheduled a telephone interview with me after the press conference.

One thing I haven't seen anybody commenting on is the fact that with SAP acquiring Sybase, it will be the last major independent database company to be merged into a larger SW company. (To say this, you can qualify MySQL AB as a major database company, but disqualify, say, EnterpriseDB or InterBase, which imho is entirely reasonable.)

Tekes, a Finnish government agency funding R&D in Technology and Innovation (including MariaDB) has recently published a book on Finnish startups, (PDF), which contains a whole chapter on MySQL AB.

It seems to be a well researched chapter and references many past interviews over the years, as well as being based on interviews of at least Mårten, Monty and Kevin Harvey of Benchmark. This is the most comprehensive narrative I've ever seen of items like "InnoDB Friday", a phrase I thought until now was company confidential, since talking about it would have revealed there was something negative about the day Oracle bought InnoDB (no kidding?). It also reveals what MySQL (AB) thought about the fact that PostgreSQL at one time was more popular than MySQL in one country in the world: Japan, or how much it raised VC capital. On the other hand it still only mentions some issues anonymously or only between the lines and reader is left guessing whether he should fill in "Oracle", "SAP" or something else in the gaps. (And I'm too much a coward to blog the right answers... Ok, so Google will tell you Oracle is the one who tried to acquire MySQL several times before.)

I will not bother to comment on Monty's keynote (but I did post the text to it so you can make up your own mind) and this brings us then back to the Tuesday and Oracle's opening keynote featuring Edward Screven.

The Friday after the official MySQL conference was double booked. In parallel with the storage engine summit, Drizzle Developer Day 2010 was also happening. This event took the form of a hackathon, with free form discussions and hands on coding. I popped in, to experience the energy.

My conclusion both from Brian's keynote and the Developer Day is that:

For the Friday after the MySQL conference, Oracle had invited all storage engines to the traditional storage engine summit, but this was then canceled (or postponed) in the last minute. Since the engine vendors had already booked the day anyway, we agreed to sponsor the facility so the meeting could take place. In addition to those who had planned to be there, the meeting was also attended by Mikael Ronström, Jonas Oreland and Sanja Byelkin who had their flights cancelled. (Oracle was already represented by Konstantin Osipov.)

Also see https://askmonty.org/wiki/Storage_Engine_Summit_2010 for more complete notes of the summit.

We then finally came to the topic that comes naturally to anyone familiar with the MySQL architecture. Could Hadoop, or Hive, or whichever, be plugged into MySQL as a storage engine? And why would you want to do that? And can Timour's work to push down JOIN conditions be of any help? (The last question was interesting since Ted and his team were inherently against talking about JOINs at all :-)

We ended up concluding that 2 things could be interesting and considered "low hanging fruit":

SQL to PIG compiler.

(Btw, it is not immediately obvious if this task needs MySQL at all.)

(This is the first in a series of blogs written while I was trying to get home from Santa Clara. Posting them now as I'm back home and online.)

These MySQL conferences certainly get more interesting every year. Last year we got acquired and I went home thinking I need to start looking for a new job. This year Eyjafjallajõkull erupted and I had trouble getting home at all!

Pre-conference there was also the suspense to see whether the conference will take place at all, but O'Reilly and Colin pulled it together perfectly! It seems most if not all Europeans will eventually find their ways home, so all in all, all is well that ends well.

To recount everything we've learned, I will step backwards in time through the highlights as I saw them.

Hi

Unusually, we actually wrote a text for Monty's keynote speech this year. I'm publishing it below. Part of the speaker notes are just bullet points though, but the text may still be interesting to publish. Also, there is a funny joke about Oracle being a major MariaDB contributor that Monty somehow missed in the speech.

The keynote is also available on Youtube. In fact, Sheeri has been nice enough to collect all videos from the conference into a playlist.