MySQL - Skills in Demand

Sun's agreement to purchase MySQL AB will consolidate commercial use of the open source originated database, although MySQL was already doing pretty well on its own.

Over 40% of software developers interviewed by Evans Data Corporation in 2006 said they used it (though not necessarily as their main database platform). It's the favourite of Web 2.0 enterprises such as Google, YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia, but with a strong presence too among telecos, whose requirement for 99.9-recurring uptime demonstrates that MySQL is far more than a free download for hobbyists, non-profits and businesses too small to afford a serious commercial database.

But such a small number of users, and modest applications in large organisations, still make up the bulk of MySQL licences. As CEO Marten Mickos says, "Other databases have many features that we don't. We are still a complement to them, although we of course do compete for individual projects where other databases are overkill or we have a more compelling licence."

According to Gartner, "MySQL will be enhanced and aided by other Sun products, such as HPC (Lustre), high-performance file systems (ZFS), Suncluster, Java, Xen virtualization (xVM), identity management and DTrace's diagnostics." This has already happened to PostgreSQL, which Sun began shipping in 2006.

As well as supporting the Lamp (Linux, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Perl/PHP/Python) stack, Sun offers its own, based on Solaris and Java. However, according to MySQL AB, around 40% of downloads are for Windows.