MySQL Gets Set For Enterprise

Once viewed as the little database for basic tasks, MySQL has a new VAR program and is gaining support for clustering technology, which stands to make the offering more suitable for use in large enterprises.

At its second annual user conference last week in Orlando, Fla., MySQL co-founders David Axmark and Michael "Monty" Widenius outlined plans to add support for Unicode, stored procedures, triggers and views,all big-time check-box items for enterprise database users.

Tim Shea, co-owner of Alpha NetSolutions, a solution provider in Worcester, Mass., said his company, which uses MySQL for about half of its database projects, will definitely join the new VAR program. "I hope more open-source companies start thinking like this. For the small- and medium-size-business space, you really need to gain the trust of consultants and resellers."

The new VAR program includes three tiers, with commissions as high as 20 percent.

The binary code of the clustering is available now with the production version set to ship next quarter. Clustering distributes the database workload across systems to gain scale. MySQL acquired the technology, developed for the telecommunications industry, with its purchase last year of Ericsson spinoff Alzato. Now, the company is billing it as the world's first open-source cluster implementation. A commercial license will cost less than $5,000 per server.

Stored procedure support is planned for version 5.0. The current release is 4.0, and 4.1 is due in production by year's end. The binary stored procedure code is already available for testing, the company said.

Axmark and Widenius hesitate to say the database they started writing in 1995 now goes head to head with the big databases from Oracle and IBM.

"If you look at the feature list of Oracle, it's like this," Axmark said, holding his hands as far apart as they reach. "We offer features like this," he added, as his hands narrowed down to a foot or so apart.

But, the two executives said, the features MySQL supplies are just fine for 80 percent to 90 percent of the market. The VAR program should further entrench the database into businesses of all sizes, they said.

The goal is to "grow the market. We can't do it all," Axmark said.

STEVEN BURKE contributed to this story.