Brandon Bailey, of the Mercury News has an excellent Q & A Session with Marten Mickos, discussing how “how MySQL fits into Sun’s efforts” and visa versa.

James Niccolai notes the various points of view regarding Suns’ recent acquisition of MySQL from MySQL conference-goers:

Customers at the MySQL conference this week said Sun Microsystems’ acquisition of the database company could increase MySQL’s credibility among senior IT decision makers still skittish about using open-source software.
There were some, though, who feared that ownership of MySQL by a traditional IT vendor would diminish growth in the community of MySQL developers, who provide a regular stream of patches and new features for the database.

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Zmanda Presents “Radically Simple” MySQL Backup and Recovery at MySQL Conference & Expo 2008

Santa Clara, Calif. (PRWEB) April 15, 2008 — Zmanda, Inc., the open source leader in backup and recovery software, today announced that its CEO and founder, Chander Kant, will deliver a keynote presentation on “Radically Simple Backup & Recovery for Live MySQL,” at the sixth annual MySQL Conference and Expo. Ann Ruckstuhl, Zmanda’s vice president of sales and marketing, and Dmitri Joukovski, vice president of product management, will also lead conference sessions highlighting technology solutions for backing up and recovering MySQL databases.

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Rich Whiting examines the enhancements promised with Sun Microsystems slated June release of MySQL 5.1,

The new release, for example, offers faster query response times by supporting both table and index data partitioning. With partitioning, only the relevant portions of a data set need to be scanned for a query instead of the entire table or index. Such partitioning also accelerates some data storage and database maintenance operations, according to Sun.

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Paula Rooney discusses the “near final” release of MySQL 5.1, which Sun Microsystem will debut later this quarter.

MindTouch Primed to Accelerate Market Expansion as It Achieves Segment Leading Customer Growth and Market Successes

SANTA CLARA, Calif. & SAN DIEGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–MindTouch, the company behind the most sophisticated wiki available today is delivering the most full-featured application platform. MindTouch Deki Wiki, which empowers everyday users to create real-time reports and integrate systems quickly, while preserving IT governance, has set major new benchmarks for company growth in the most recent calendar quarter ending March 31. This quarter was MindTouch’s largest ever with respect to sales, revenue, and enterprise deployments - and is the fifth consecutive quarter of increasing sales. MindTouch is showcasing Deki Wiki this week at the MySQL Conference and Expo in the DotOrg Pavilion, which is located in the Expo Hall.

New Database Appliance from Kickfire Propels Sun Microsystems’ MySQL to Number One in Data Warehousing Price-Performance

SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Kickfire™, Inc. and Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) today announced Transaction Processing Performance Council - H (TPC-H) benchmark results that break previous price-performance records. The benchmarks were run on Kickfire’s new database appliance, which is based on Sun’s MySQL™ database. The Kickfire Database Appliance demonstrates the speed of high-performance commercial database systems at a fraction of the cost with an exceptionally small, low-power footprint and the hallmark ease-of-use of MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database.

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Across the pond, Peter Judge writes about the Sun acquisition of MySQL which was big news at the conference last week:

Sun has delivered a “near final” build of the next version of MySQL and has promised to make no changes to the culture of the open-source database organisation whose $1bn (£500m) purchase was announced in January. A release candidate of Version 5.1 of MySQL can be downloaded now, but the full production version should be ready by June, said Marten Mickos, former chief executive of MySQL and now a Sun vice president. He has no desire to repeat the bug problems of MySQL 5.0, which the company released two years ago, he told the sixth annual MySQL Conference & Expo, in Santa Clara, California, this week.

Zack Urlocker gives a good overview of the conference.

Charles Cooper reports on his conversation with Marten Mickos.

SANTA CLARA, CA. — April 16, 2008 — Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the availability of MySQL™ Workbench, a new visual database design tool that integrates data modeling, physical database design, database creation, change management and documentation capabilities into a single, seamless environment for MySQL developers and DBAs.

MySQL Workbench is available for download in two versions: an open source Community Edition and a (US) $99 commercial Standard Edition. Both are available now for Microsoft Windows, with future cross-platform support for Linux and Macintosh OS X under development.

The announcement was made this morning at the sixth annual MySQL Conference and Expo. With nearly 2,000 attendees, it is the world’s largest community event for open source database developers, users, DBAs, vendors and corporate IT managers.

San Jose, CA April 15, 2008 - Continuent, Inc., the leading provider of
commercial open source middleware solutions for database high-availability
and scalability, today announced a key addition to their executive
management team. Craig Stevens joins Continuent as Vice President of
Worldwide Sales and Marketing, responsible for expanding its customer base
and building long-term relationships with clients. Read the full release here .

Sun Microsystems pushed out a “near final” version of MySQL 5.1 on Tuesday, but is holding back the production release of the open-source database until it irons out some remaining bugs, officials said Tuesday. James Niccolai reports from MySQL.

When Sun Microsystems paid $1 billion to buy MySQL, perhaps the biggest question facing the merger was the apparent culture clash, writes Charles Cooper.

Charles Babcock talked to Sun Microsystems senior VP Marten Mickos. “Sun has a lot of expertise in scalability,” he said in an interview following his keynote before the MySQL Conference & Expo, an annual MySQL user group meeting, in Santa Clara, Calif. Tuesday.