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SearchDatabase.com: MySQL and the open source revolution; Q&A with Britt Johnston of NuSphere

[ Thanks to Tim
DiChiara
for this link. ]

pvio425922: MySQL has traditionally been free
for individuals and very low-cost for commercial uses. What value
does NuSphere add?

Britt_Johnston: Last year, NuSphere was
instrumental in helping the principal developers bring MySQL under
the General Public License. Being available as GPL broadens the
appeal of MySQL even further. MySQL can be freely distributed under
the terms of the GPL for both individual and commercial use. Today
NuSphere creates an integrated multi-platform distribution of
MySQL, Perl, PHP, and Apache. This requires us to work with all
four communities to get their latest software, integrate and test
it, work with the communities to fix the issues. We recently had a
review of NuSphere MySQL at about.com and it was clear that work
was appreciated. You can find out more of the specifics at our
website at www.nusphere.com.”

jglossner93964: What big corporations use
MySQL? Have any switched from a proprietary system to open
source?

Britt_Johnston: Most major corporations have
MySQL in some part of their web infrastructure. The names are as
diverse as Boeing and Yahoo! I saw a recent announcement that NASA
switched to MySQL for specific parts of their web site for
performance reasons. A trend we see is companies are increasingly
looking at MySQL for broader use–they had good success with it in
a specific role and they are looking to expand that role.”

bsheets754441: What are the future
enhancements that NuSphere plans to bring to MySQL?

Britt_Johnston: NuSphere, through Gemini,
would provide row-level locking, ACID transactions and automatic
crash recovery. That will feed more features such as multiple
isolation levels and features like SELECT FOR UPDATE
that can
allow applications to scale beyond [current limits]. There is also
support for larger servers–wider SMP systems that are
important when databases get very large. Finally, there are
additional features like cluster support that allow high
availability solutions with extreme uptime requirements.”


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