Aslett notes that it will be a "first" for a proprietary database company to embrace an open source database:

"Here are just two things of note: Oracle has suggested it will offer support for the MySQL code, undercutting the company, and Oracle is already distributing the open source database management system. . .

Despite the competitive threat, Mickos is unmoved. “I hope they do that,” he said, noting that it would be seen as an endorsement of the open source database, and revealing that Oracle has already inadvertently endorsed the product."

Robin Schumacher, author and MySQL VP, notes that MySQL offers good support as well: "We're really not worried about Oracle supporting MySQL as Marten said.  It would be an endorsement of the open source DB movement, which just makes us stronger in may ways.":

"MySQL Enterprise Unlimited Site Agreements Now Available for the Cost of a Single CPU of Oracle Enterprise

Open Source Vendor Continues to Disrupt Traditional Enterprise Sales Models with All-You-Can-Eat Database Subscriptions for ,000

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- January 30, 2007 -- MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today unveiled a simpler way for large and growing organizations to acquire and adopt enterprise software.

Designed with a customer's perspective in mind, a one-year MySQL Enterprise Unlimited subscription offers a company-wide enterprise site agreement at the unprecedented low price of ,000 (EUR 32,000, GBP 24,000).

"MySQL Enterprise has made it significantly easier to purchase database software and technical support for our entire organization," said Glenn Bergeron, systems manager for Instaclick Inc., one of the first companies to take advantage of MySQL Enterprise Unlimited. "This new offering is ideal for corporate IT organizations with a growing number of projects but a tightly-fixed budget."

MySQL Enterprise Unlimited is designed for companies with existing site licenses for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase and IBM DB2. Last year, a survey of the Independent Oracle User Group showed that a full third of its membership also used MySQL (1). With a MySQL Enterprise Unlimited subscription, an organization can develop, manage and fully support any number of MySQL database applications -- significantly reducing IT time, cost and risk.

"Due in large part to advantages in distribution and volume, open source has the ability to disrupt traditional enterprise software pricing," said Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst for RedMonk. "MySQL is attempting to prove as much with its latest site wide agreements, which offer customers the ability to support every database across their enterprise at a fraction of the traditional cost."

In the past year, MySQL AB has experienced record growth in its enterprise subscription business. In the fourth quarter, the company launched its new MySQL Enterprise offering, a comprehensive set of production-tested software, proactive monitoring tools, and premium support services. [See today's related press release, "MySQL AB Completes Record Year".]"

"The IOT option allows users to store indexes and tables and associated rows in the same place, reducing the amount of effort necessary to "fetch" information, according to Birch.

Before Bebo.com started using IOT, records for individual site users were stored in different places and on different discs, and retrieving the information required a lot of physical I/O. That dilemma led Bebo.com to IOT.

"We adopted IOT, and we converted our tables to it. You can actually convert tables on the fly and it doesn't require downtime," Birch said. "We converted a lot of tables and saw huge gains in terms of the amount of discs we needed."

Things are currently running efficiently at Bebo.com, but Birch says that -- going forward -- anything Oracle can do to help improve database performance would be welcomed with open arms."

Contrary to the "pure" relational model which says that physical disk organization should not matter, real-world DBA's frequently reorganize tables to maximize I/O efficiency.  IOT's and Oracle Cluster tables allow for related rows to be stored adjacent to one another on a single disk block, dramatically reducing disk I/O overhead. 

"Novell angered members of the open-source community that develops Linux and other free software programs in November when it entered a wide-ranging business deal with Microsoft.

Critics called on the board to punish Novell by banning it from distributing new versions of Linux software, said Moglen.

Linux is the most popular variant of open-source software. Unlike proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows, open-source software lets developers share code and add functions and is generally available at no cost.

Moglen said the board has not made a decision on the matter but that he expects it to announce a ruling within two weeks.

If the foundation decides to take action, the ban would apply to new versions of Linux covered under a licensing agreement due to take effect in March."

Of the 812 respondents surveyed in January, 49% of them were currently running Solaris.  However, 44% of those respondents indicated they would be running their databases on Linux next year this time.

Ari Kaplan, IOUG president, said this is a "huge" showing for open source, underscoring both its large-scale enterprise adoption and businesses' growing urge to unyoke themselves from Unix's high costs.

"Now the market has accepted Linux. [It] has accepted [that] you can run hugely scalable, Oracle RAC [Real Application Clusters], multinode, thousands-of-concurrent-user Oracle instances, on Linux," said Kaplan in Chicago. "[Combine that with] the overall lower cost of ownership, and you've got the best of both worlds, and we're seeing the results."

The accelerator service is designed to help customers streamline the deployment of grid infrastructures for data centers that run on Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The accelerator service works with a system stack that entails Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Application Server 10g, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g.

The accelerator service is similar to a plug-in or device driver as opposed to a full blown software package. It  provides a service that uses Oracle grid control management software and the automated storage management feature of Oracle Database 10g to provide customized management settings for monitoring and managing grid applications—along with infrastructure software and storage.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 had been scheduled to ship by the end of 2006. However, the company began giving itself scheduling wiggle room in September, when Red Hat released the first RHEL 5 beta. A second beta arrived in November.

Now Red Hat is being more definitive. "I'm sure we will ship a gold (version) on February 28," Chief Executive Matthew Szulik, referring to the final version, said in an interview after the company reported its quarterly financial results.

The delay isn't a major problem for Red Hat, said Pund-IT analyst Charles King.

"Making certain that RHEL 5 is thoroughly locked, loaded and debugged before sending it out the door (is) more important in the end than meeting a deadline," he said. And because Red Hat sells software subscriptions, all existing customers get free upgrades, so the company doesn't consider the new version a "revenue event," he added.

One major feature arriving in RHEL 5 is Xen, virtualization software that lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously. The technology's initial advantage is to let administrators load up a server more efficiently, but virtualization in the longer run also holds promise for reliability and flexibility because virtual machines can be moved from one computer to another while running.

Virtualization has been a feature on higher-end servers for years and has arrived on mainstream x86 machines chiefly through software from EMC's VMware subsidiary. Xen lacks VMware's market power, but the open-source software is being incorporated as a standard feature of corporate versions of Linux and the x86 version of Sun Microsystems' Solaris.

Microsoft is working on another virtualization competitor, code-named Viridian. It's due to ship within 180 days of "Longhorn Server," the server cousin to Windows Vista.

Reworking an operating system's foundation, as "hypervisors" such as Xen require, is necessarily complicated, however, and Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens said maturing and incorporating Xen is the major factor on which RHEL 5 depends.

RHEL 5 is based on version 2.6.18 of the Linux kernel--the core of the operating system--compared to 2.6.9 for the current RHEL 4. The software includes new security features to protect against some attacks, plus a "technology preview" of Red Hat's Stateless Linux software to let desktop machines pull data and settings from central servers.

Red Hat's chief competitor, Novell, began shipping Xen in its Suse Linux Enterprise Server months ago, but so far, the company hasn't threatened Red Hat's commercial Linux dominance. A newer threat--Oracle, which announced in October that it will release a free RHEL clone and sell its own support for the software--so far hasn't been a problem.

"Clearly, the doomsday scenario that some investors feared regarding the entrance of Oracle into the enterprise Linux arena and the ramifications of the Novell-Microsoft partnership did not materialize in the quarter," W.R. Hambrecht analyst Robert Stimson said in a note last week.

Red Hat's billings increased 50 percent, compared with the year-earlier quarter, to 3 million, well above analysts' average expectations of 0 million to 5 million, Stimson said.

One challenge Red Hat faces is integration of JBoss, open-source software from a company of the same name that Red Hat acquired in June. Red Hat reiterated earlier guidance that JBoss would produce million to million in revenue by the end of February, prompting Merrill Lynch analyst Kash Rangan to say in a note that JBoss is "tracking well."

Among Red Hat sales worth at least million in the quarter, two-thirds involved JBoss software, Szulik said. "When we acquired (JBoss, it) was an unprofitable venture. It is still unprofitable, but it's improving," he said. Red Hat expanded JBoss sales into Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, and the acquisition presents an opportunity to boost revenue from subscription renewals, he said.

Los responsables anticompetencia finalizaron su revisión del acuerdo sin tomar ninguna acción para bloquearlo, dijo la Comisión del Mercado de Valores.

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