MySQL is one of the most popular open-source databases. The question is: is to to Oracle what Linux is to Windows? More from an InfoWorld interview with MySQL’s CEO MrtenMickos:
MM: The typical customer has plenty of, say, DB2 installations, and they come to us and say, Couldn’t we use you in some of those instead? Today those applications are typically Web sites, Web applications and intranets, that’s one area. The second area is administration — network administration, authorization, database log-in, and also logging data, for systems management. The third area is data warehousing, where you have masses of data being dumped in and out. Then we are at the edge of the enterprise. We’re not a typical datacenter database today but we are a good fit at the edge — at the departmental level and in remote locations. That’s where you can use us.
That [databases are a commodity] is our assumption. Being a commodity market is not a black and white issue, it’s about proportions. You say, how much of the database market is a commodity, and we say, whatever is a commodity, that’s where we’ll act. There will always be a non-commodity segment too and that’s fine, we’re not making any claims there.
We had roughly 3,000 a year ago, and we have 4,000 now. It is growing rapidly so, if we added 1,000 last year we’ll add roughly 2,000 to 3,000 this year…We are now breaking even so, on a quarterly basis we are profitable.
