At the MySQL conference, I talked with Marten Mickos (pictured, photo by James Duncan Davidson), the newly appointed VP of the Database Group at Sun. This group is comprised of the former 400+ MySQL employees plus the 60 or so people of Sun's database technology group that were doing optimisations and porting of databases (Oracle, Postgres...) for Sun's hardware, as well as the Clustra team from Norway specialised in cluster database technology. Mickos also discarded the possibility that Sun will abandon support for the other open source database like Memcached or Postgres.

"Windows is the biggest download in number and Linux is biggest in terms of business. Of course we'll work with Solaris like before but in proportion of what it represents in our marketplace... It's important in the modern world not to be technology religious. Sure we're proud to have an operating systems in the same company and many other products and we'll work closely with them, but it is our customers who decide", says Mickos.

On SAP's decision to "close source" MaxDB that MySQL helped popularised, Mickos had a practical stance.

"They more than payed for our work on MaxDB... The close sourcing was not planned when we started working on it. But that was one of the eventualities... Anyway, this is old technology, client-server. MySQL is for the Web world".

Mickos also pointed out that open source licenses work differently in a software/platform as a service. Business models are going to be different. "We need to find the right metric to measure it... per user, per month, per data traffic, per computing...".

On competition, Mickos only sees Oracle and Microsoft. The others are "old world", client-server databases. Kind of easy way to see the world, isn't it?

On integrating the MySQL team inside of Sun:

"We will integrate fully... organisation-wise we will work very closely with everybody else in the company. And I think it's the only to succeed. You must be one company, with one vision, one culture. We will contribute our culture and we'll change our own".

MySQL employees will not be forced to go and work from a Sun office!

"For any employee Sun gives 3 options: you work from home, you work in an office or you move between offices... Sun doesn't have 70% working from home like we have and they have high percentage. And this was one of the positive items when we started talking with them: "hey! you must know that we work from home". And they said, "so what? so do we"... They're not asking us to move to offices".