Michael

ike many developers before him, Michael Widenius' breakthrough happened when he decided to take matters into his own hands.

Widenius,nicknamed Monty by his mother after General Montgomery,had taken on side work as a teenager in 1978 porting applications from big iron systems down onto microcomputers. His challenge: There was no place to store the data associated with the software. So, Widenius developed his own simple database using BASIC. Widenius says other database choices at the time were limited by speed and scalability.

That software has become the core for MySQL, a database licensed and marketed by the company bearing the same name.

The 41-year-old Widenius says the real innovation came in 1995, when his team created an SQL layer that allowed the original database to be used over the Internet. Today, he says, most of his first customers are still on board with MySQL, which now claims 4 million-plus installations.

There are about 20 developers currently working on core MySQL source code, and Widenius is trying to get more into active development rather than code review, as interested outside parties suggest changes.

"People have written hundreds of clients and connected the server to hundreds of different languages," Widenius says. "We would never have been able to do this as a regular commercial company."