Sun, With Oracle Deal At Hand, Shows New MySQL, Related Products

Oracle on Monday said it plans to acquire Sun in a $7.4 billion deal, announced shortly after an earlier bid by IBM to acquire Sun fell through.

Sun took advantage of the MySQL Conference and Expo being held this week in Santa Clara, Calif., to launch the MySQL Remote DBA (database administrator) partner program to recruit consulting companies and service providers that want to work with the MySQL database.

The effort is part of Sun's broader MySQL Enterprise Connection Alliance (MECA) partner program.

An increasing number of companies are outsourcing database administration tasks to DBA service providers, according to Sun, to reduce costs and free up on-staff database managers for more value-producing development projects.

Candidates for the MySQL Remote DBA initiative must have at least three MySQL-certified DBAs for gold status and six for platinum status. Other benefits and requirements of the program can be found on the MySQL partner portal.

Sun also used the conference to debut MySQL 5.4, a new release of the open-source database that is slated to be generally available later this year, offering a raft of performance and scalability gains.

Topping the list of enhancements are improvements to the InnoDB storage engine in MySQL that allow the database to run on SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) 16-way x86 servers and 64-way Sun CMT (chip multithreading technology) servers. That more than doubles the software's previous capacity, according to Sun.

Other changes boost the database system's performance. Subquery optimizations, for example, improve the response times for some data queries as much as 90 percent. New query algorithms speed up the execution of multiway data joins. Other upgrades of the database's inner workings include improved stored procedures, prepared statements and information schemas.

Altogether, the new MySQL release delivers 40 percent faster application performance, Sun said. "There's a tremendous improvement in speed, performance, ease-of-use and scalability," said Jeff Wiss, MySQL marketing vice president.

Copies of the preview version of MySQL 5.4 are available from the MySQL.com Web site.

Sun also launched MySQL Cluster 7.0, a new release of the software that provides shared-nothing clustering capabilities for the MySQL database. Along with scalability and performance improvements, the 7.0 release supports LDAP directories and offers simpler data backup and maintenance.

In order to increase the performance of MySQL and other Web-based applications, Sun also used the conference to tie those applications to its Open Network Systems approach to Internet infrastructures with a new reference architecture.

That architecture ties the applications to the company's latest storage, server and networking offerings, including Sun's new line of Intel Xeon 5500 "Nehalem"-based servers, which were introduced last week.

The reference architecture includes the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System with blade servers based on AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon or UltraSPARC processors; the Sun Blade 6000 Virtualized Multi-Fabric 10-Gbit Ethernet Network Express Module; and Sun's open-storage technologies, such as the Sun Storage 7000 "Amber Road" family.

On the software side, the reference architecture includes MySQL Enterprise Server, Sun's GlassFish Web application portfolio, Solaris ZFS, and either the Linux or Solaris operating system.

Harmeet Chauhan, group marketing manager for Web infrastructure marketing at Sun, said deployments based on the new reference architecture are already starting. "These solutions can be deployed by Sun partners who have expertise around MySQL and Sun's hardware," Chauhan said.

Solution providers can access the tools and technology needed to deploy large complex Internet infrastructure projects through the Sun Specialty Program, which Sun started in January, Chauhan said.

"We make sure they get the expertise and hand-holding needed from Sun for the deployment," he said.

At the MySQL Conference and Expo, Sun also demonstrated the scalability and performance of its Web infrastructure software running on its hardware. Chauhan said that, when using 20 blade servers running MySQL and GlassFish Web Space Server, it's possible to add 1 million users in a very short time, with 400 concurrent users per second being able to log in.