Mårten
Mickos
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Mårten
Mickos
|
As the CEO of MySQL, the company behind the open-source database, MySQL, Mårten Mickos is leading the company's move into the enterprise market against players such as Sybase, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. The company recently announced optimization for the Intel Itanium 2 processor running Linux, directed at large databases, data mining, and other enterprise applications. Jon Udell, the InfoWorld Test Center's lead analyst, spoke with Mickos about dual licensing, modular architecture, and the perception vs. the reality of MySQL. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]I first met Mårten (that's a Unicode U+00E5, LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE, HTML entity å) about six years ago. He was working for Solid Technologies, whose database I had chosen for the subscriber version of BYTE.com I was then building. In 1997 the acronym LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl|Python|PHP) had not yet appeared, but you could say it was a LAP project: Linux, Apache, and Perl.
The notion of building what was for me a mission-critical application on open source foundations was a bit radical, and so I actually prototyped on a dual track: Linux/Apache/Perl and the Solid database versus NT/IIS/Perl and the NT version of Solid. In the end I chose the LAP solution. If I had to make the same choice today, I'm not sure which way I'd jump. My solution depended on Apache's mod_rewrite, a technology that's still not mature in the Windows space. On the other hand, the .NET Framework is very appealing. But here's the real point: LAP has morphed into LAMP, and the landscape of choice is different. A key component which did not then play a prominent role in the open source half of the equation -- the database -- now does.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/04/08.html#a661