Today we sat through a pizza ‘n pop lunch while listening to a MySQL Offering and Licensing for the company I have been working for as a permanent for about a year now. Since the take-over by Oracle, the joke was that speculators were thinking that the new version of MySQL would be Oracle 11gMy or simply Oracle Lite J

The Oracle Account Manager and MySQL Enterprise Salesman described to us how MySQL AB was founded in ‘95, and that it quickly became the most popular open-source database. It has been quite a success story, with a truly global group of geeks that contributed over the years. They continued to inform us that today there are approximately 12 Million Production Installations and approximately 70,000 downloads a day – half of them to be hosted on the Windows platform.  It should be noted that Facebook, with 500M users, is all MySQL backend according to the pair: Account Manager from Sales Consultant from Oracle Corporation Canada. One primary reason that MySQL has done so well is that it scales out, as did Google with its consumer hardware in the beginning, from cheaper consumer/custom build systems that were added onto, and expanded upwards.

MySQL Cluster on the NDB Engine (applicaitons requiring 99.999% uptime, auto-failover, high perf.) is the full on Enterprise version (at a cost), and Oracle’s MySQL strategy is to be open, integrated, complete, while remaining low cost/risk, and reliable. Oracle bought MySQL because it is best of breed and a complete RDBMS.

What I did not know so much, was that there is a MySQL & Oracle history of development together. In 2005 Oracle purchased InnoBase Oy, makers of InnoDB, and the following year, Oracle renewed the InnoDB license. Of the RDBMS market share, according to them, MySQL is a leader for embedded, saas, Online, ad hoc DBs, and Data Marts, whilst it holds much less market share with ERP, CRM, or DW than Oracle itself (so a niche market). Golden Gate, subject of a lot of positive buzz, is integrated also with Oracle MySQL, since it is a clear addition to Oracle’s existing database suite of products, including TimesTen, Berkely DB open source.  They stated that MySQL is global business within Oracle, actually defined by them as the Oracle Open Source Global Business Unit, and this was demonstrated during Oracle OpenWorld having a day dedicated solely to MySQL: the MySQL Sunday session.

In the future, there will be more Windows platform development, as well as for the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) platform – their primary target audiences/clients, and huge fan base obviously.
It should be noted, that If you distribute MySQL within an app, then it is mandatory to buy a commercial license (OEM license fee). Of the 12M installations, most are community server, the free version.  
They claim their branch is still pure MySQL, and although the original creators have moved onto creating a new Nordic style ORM (Paul Nielsen will like this?), new flavour of MySQL, Oracle is dedicated to this database platform.

For my part, I am quite impressed with MySQL Workbench, and its updated versions, seemingly every month, since June this year. One can download the Workbench tool for all common operating systems here:
http://www.mysql.com/click.php?e=35294

As part of a group of DBAs asked to handle a large group of MySQL Instances, once you include all the test, development and production environments, the most usefull for production was this great new administrative tool.  I liked it so much that I left a super positive comment on the MySQL Workbench download page while hoping not to be accused of heterodoxy by my fellow SQL Server MVPs.  I am not alone, other comments from some SQL Server users are here. 
Just check out the Administrative print screen from their site.

Not only does the tool have the typical SQL Editor Query window, but it also has a humble entity relationship diagram tool called Data Modelling built in just like all the larger vendors do
(or is Oracle’s influence that strong already on MySQL, I wonder?):

Just today, funnily enough, I was spammed by Oracle regarding the New MySQL 5.5 release for windows:
Their claim of being 1500% faster makes me wonder how much Oracle's better knowledge of the Windows Platorm (Lock pages in memory, etc), and how to truly optimise applications for this platform, has to do with such a mega difference between 5.1 and 5.5.