Here, there be dragons...

Still shell-shocked from the announcement of Sun's intent to acquire MySQL, I was among the many at Martin's presentation for whom his words seemed to miss our ears and whose eyes failed to register what was on the slides before us. A sea of silence. Martin quite nerviously continued on while, for me, I was stunned, expecting an IPO announcement and thinking that what was before me was a hypothetical situation being shared.

It was very real.

Now that I have had a couple of days to allow the news to embed, I can reflect upon the situation more rationally: Out of all the big names in the IT industry, Sun is perhaps the best and only choice for which the purchase would not be for the brand. MySQL has a very real chance of sustained survival in Sun's ecosystem. Talking to many collegues, I think the outlook is generally very positive except with a small number of reservations revolving around IP issues. As to how I personally feel: Still a little stunned but I think that for the ongoing future survival for MySQL as a product and as a community, being acquired by Sun is the best possible scenerio.

As MySQL is now set on a course into terra incognita, being swallowed whole by Sun, MySQL's staff will have to navigate with trepidation in our new world. Where MySQL is a small company full of smart individuals, there is a fear among some that their voices will be lost among the ocean of Sun's talented.

Time will tell.

These past weeks

Ever since I submitted the "External Language Stored Procedures" project which Eric and myself have been working on to be listed on FreshMeat, it has gained a small number of interested users and we have just started to get some feedback. Yay! Always nice to know when people are using your code. Okay, so one of the emails contained a feature request: Support for PHP stored procedures. I think I shall play with that during my Christmas vacation next week. The weekend refresh took a little longer than expected to complete due to changes inside the mysqld code but I managed to test and push the changes before midnight.

Sometimes a task morphs gradually as requirements creep in... WL#3771 is one of those where even the title and direction has changed completely through its evolution.. Last week and this, I have completed a draft of the code in the task's current incarnation and hope it will be deemed acceptable and pushable soon.

A few days ago, I had just completed porting the Falcon storage engine to Sparc and PowerPC (again). Verified that all tests which aren't disabled complete successfully. I have been told that Jim will review the patch and may push portions vaguely based upon my patch sometime in the hand-wavy future.