Interview with Marten Mickos
Marten Mickos is now the head of the Database Group at Sun Microsystems
I have asked Marten a few questions related to the new strategy of MySQL, now part of Sun Microsystems.
See his reply below.
RVZ
Q1. It appears as if the positioning of MySQL has been refocused more predominately on the Web applications / SaaS / ASP market in the last year or so. Would you agree with this, and if so, what does that mean regarding the potential of MySQL to penetrate further into the enterprise?
Marten Mickos:
Great question. We believe that enterprises will move to web-based architectures, and with that wave, MySQL is penetrating the enterprise market.
Goldman Sachs stated in 2006 that “the shift to more web-based applications in the enterprise is unstoppable”. The percentage is still relatively low (10-20% I think) but it is growing.
Q2. Lack of enterprise-grade support and vendor services are frequently cited in surveys as the #1 barrier to the adoption of
FOSS RDBMSs by the enterprise. In this sense, can you give some specific examples of how the Sun acquisition is playing with enterprise clients?
Marten Mickos:
Very true. Before we got acquired we didn’t really believe this (we had so many customers anyhow), but we see a clear change now. Thanks to Sun, we are in active dialogue with CIOs and others of very large corporations.
Q3. One could make the argument that the Big 3 (Oracle, IBM and Microsoft) did not have an appropriately tailored offering (particularly on price) for the build-out of the Web, and that this largely left the field clear for MySQL (as part of the LAMP stack). What do you expect their strategy to be over the long-term?
Marten Mickos:
Yep, I think that’s a valid assertion.
But they are not stupid, and they all have great strategies for the future. Microsoft SQL Server is marching into the web world with the entire Microsoft stack. They are perhaps not overly successful, but within the domain of web apps that run on Windows, SQL Server has a reasonable share. Oracle seems to be attempting to cover the SaaS companies, and they have a reasonably good start there. IBM is focusing on their on-demand story with DB2 on a variety of IBM platforms.
These are just my observations and I may be wrong, of course. Overall I think that the big 3 will continue to have good business for themselves, but I also think that in the most rapidly growing market segments they may have no special advantage.
Q4. What consequences do you think Sun’s acquisition will have for MySQL as an open source product? Can you maintain the user involvement and open source brand? How will you manage the innovation process in the future?
Marten Mickos:
A key reason for us accepting the acquisition offer was that we saw and liked the new open source strategy of Sun. They are fully committed to open source and to the architecture of participation. If anything, this should have a positive effect for us.
Q5: Where Sun wants to brings persistence with respect to objects?
Marten Mickos:
I believe that this is a question for the application designer. As a vendor of software and hardware infrastructure, we at Sun need to accommodate all needs. You get persistence through MySQL or JavaDB (in native Java) or you can use memory-based tools such as Memcached. And with various object-relational mapping technologies you can go from non-persistence to persistence according to your own desires.
Q6: LINQ is leading in database API innovation, providing native language data access. Why is there no LINQ for Java?
Marten Mickos:
I don’t know.
Q7. Sun and Java go together synonymously, ala the change in Sun’s ticker symbol to Java. However, it’s been written that Java users represent a smaller subset of the MySQL community which is largely composed of PHP, Python, Perl, C, C++ developers. How do you plan to increase your appeal to the Java user community?
Marten Mickos:
The P languages are likely to continue to be the most important for MySQL, and Ruby on Rails is growing in popularity. But we always had an initiative to grow the installed base in the Java world. The most important thing we can do is have a great JDBC driver, which I think we have. It is highly performant and it supports the most important functions and constructs. Now as we are part of Sun we will be able to further remove barriers to adoption. We will probably create more how-to documents, tutorials, and sample applications, plus benchmarks etc. – all of which are intended to make it more appealing to use MySQL from a Java app.
Q8. As a company, you need to derive revenue to survive. You’ve done that successfully using an open source model that focuses on services and value added upgrade licenses. Those tools, while establishing a vast user community including 100’s of millions of installations, have driven relatively modest revenues. Going forward, which revenue generating tool do you see providing the most return to Sun’s investment in MySQL, services or licenses and why?
Marten Mickos:
We have always had a business model of providing commercially licensed stuff to customers. This will continue. From a technical standpoint we know that open source is a more efficient way to produce software, but from a business standpoint we have chosen to produce certain smaill add-ons for paying customers only. In this way we can combine the best of open source with a great revenue model. This is probably why we are the fastest growing database business in the world.
///mgm
Object Database Systems: Quo vadis?
I wanted to have an opinion on some critical questions related to Object Databases:
Where are Object Database Systems going? Are Relational database systems becoming Object Databases? Do we need a standard for Object Databases? Why ODMG did not succeed?
I have therefore interviewed one of our Experts, Mike Card , on his view on the current State of the Union of object database systems.
Mike works with Syracuse Research Corporation (SRC) and is involved in object databases and their application to challenging problems, including pattern recognition. He chairs the ODBT group in OMG to advance object database standardization.
Question1:
It has been said (See Java Panel II ) that an Object Database System in order to be a suitable solution to the object persistence problem needs to support not only a richer object model, but it also has to support set-oriented, scalable, cost-based-optimized query processing, and high-throughput transactions.
Do current ODBMS offer these features?
Mike Card:
In my opinion, no though the support for true transactional processing varies between vendors. Some products use “optimistic” concurrency control, which is suitable only for environments where there is very little concurrent access to the database, such as single-threaded embedded applications. In my opinion, a database engine is not “scalable” (at least in the enterprise sense of the word) if it is based on optimistic concurrency control. This is because most truly large-scale applications will require optimal performance with many concurrent transactions, and this cannot be achieved when updates have to be rolled back at transaction commit time and re-attempted due to access conflicts.
Question2:
Relational systems are rapidly becoming object database systems (See Java Panel II ). Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Why?
Mike Card:
I would disagree, because relational databases still fundamentally access objects as rows of tables and do not offer seamless integration into a host programming language’s type system. It is true that there are some good ORMs out there, but these will never offer the performance or seamlessness that is available with a good ODBMS. I would agree that ORMs are getting better, but relational databases themselves are not becoming object databases.
Question3:
A lot of the worlds systems are built on relational technology and those systems need to be extended and integrated.
That job is always difficult. An ODBMS should be able to fully participate in the enterprise data ecosystem as well as any other DBMS for both new development as well as enhancing existing applications. How this can be achieved?
What is your opinion on this issue?
Mike Card:
As many vendors have noted, this is to some extent a marketing problem in terms of making enterprise customers aware of what object databases can do. It is also a technology issue, however, as engines based on “small-scale” concepts like optimistic concurrency control are not suitable to many enterprise environments.
Question4:
Object databases vary greatly from vendor to vendor. Is a standard for object databases (still) needed? If yes, what needs to be standardized in your opinion?
Mike Card:
Yes, I believe it is. The APIs for creating, opening, deleting, and synchronizing/replicating databases as well as the native query APIs should be standardized to allow application portability. Any APIs needed to insert objects into the database, remove them from the database, or create an index on them should also be standardized, again for the sake of application portability. I would also like to see a standard XML format for exporting object database contents to allow for data portability. I am not sure our current OMG effort can achieve all of these standardization goals, but I would like to.
Question5:
How would this new standard would different to the previous effort in ODMG? And what relationships this new standard would have with standards such as SQL?
Mike Card:
Unlike the previous ODMG standard, the new standard should have a conformance test suite that anyone can download and run against a candidate product. The standard itself should also be unambiguous and use precise language as is done in ISO standards for things like programming languages, e.g. ISO/IEC 8652 (Ada programming language standard).
The primary focus of an object database standard should be its support of a native programming language, so I would expect that an object database standard might be more closely tied to an ISO standard for an object programming language (Ada, C++, other ISO-standardized languages that may appear) than to SQL, though perhaps if a LINQ-like native query capability were included in the object database standard would also reference the SQL standard due to the use of SQL-like verbs and semantics in LINQ.
Question6:
LINQ is leading in database API innovation, providing native language data access. Is this a suitable standard for ODBMS? Why?
Mike Card:
LINQ looks like it has a lot of promise in this area. We (the Object Database Technology Working Group in OMG) are currently evaluating LINQ vs. the stack-based query language (SBQL) developed at the Polish-Japanese Institute for Information Technology to see how these technologies compare for handling complex queries. SBQL has proven to be very good for complex queries and is being deployed in several EU projects, though it is unknown to most American developers. We are doing this evaluation to ensure LINQ is a good foundation for developers of applications that require complex queries, and is not too “small-scale” in its current form. We also want to hear from the LINQ community on plans (if any) to include update capability in LINQ and we need to be sure there are no surprises for parallel transaction execution.
Question7:
When object databases are a suitable solution for an Enterprise and when they are not?
Mike Card:
They are not suitable when the engine is intended primarily for use in single-threaded embedded systems (optimistic concurrency control is a good indicator of this as I mentioned earlier).
An object database would be suitable for use in an enterprise system if it was really good at large-scale data management, i.e. the engine was designed to handle large volumes of data and many parallel transactions. Some object databases are not built like this, they are designed for use primarily in single-threaded embedded applications with fairly small data volumes and as such they would not be good candidates for enterprise applications.
Besides the technology used in the database engine itself, a good enterprise object database would need database maintenance tools (e.g. taking database A offline and replacing it with database B, updating or fiddling with database A and then bringing it back on-line, scheduling backups of databases and replicating databases between sites etc.).
Question 8:
Future direction of object databases. Where do they go?
Mike Card:
The answer to this question depends on where object programming languages themselves go. Up to this point, programming languages have not included the concept of persistence, it is always included as a “foreign” thing to be dealt with using APIs for things like file I/O etc. This is a very 1960s view of persistence, where programs were things that lived in core memory and persistent things were data fil
es written out to tape or disk.
The closest thing to true integration of persistence I have seen is in Ruby with its “PStore” class. I would like to see persistence integrated even more fully, where objects can be declared persistent or made persistent a la
public class myClass {
persistent Integer[] myInts = new Integer[5];
Integer[] myOtherInts = new Integer[2];
public void aMethod() {
myOtherInts.makePersistent();
}
}
and the programming language itself would take care of maintaining them in files and loading them in at program start-up etc. without any additional work from the programmer.
Now there are obviously challenges with this as this small example shows. What does it mean to initialize a persistent object in a class declaration? Is the object re-initialized when the program starts up? Or is the persisted value retained, rendering the initialization clause meaningless on a subsequent run of the program? Should persistent objects be allowed to have initialization clauses like this? What are the rules about inter-object access? Must persistence by reachability be used to ensure referential integrity? Can a “stack” variable (i.e. a variable declared in a method) be declared or made persistent, or must persistent variables be at the class level or even “global” (static)? Are these questions different for interpreted languages like Ruby which do not have the same notions of class as languages like Java? These are computer science/discrete math questions that will be answered during the language design process which will in turn determine how much “database” functionality ends up in the language itself.
If persistence were fully integrated into an object programming language in this way, then the role of an object database for that language might be to just provide an efficient way to organize and search the program’s persistent variables. This would reduce the scope of what an object database has to do, since today an object database not only has to provide efficient organization and search (index and query) capability, but it also has to make objects persistent as seamlessly as possible. Of course, this “reduction in scope” would only be possible if the default persistence mechanism for the programming language was implemented in a way that was efficient and fast for large numbers of objects.
##
More on the topic of Java Object Persistence …
I have this time interviewed the following ODBMS.ORG experts Jose Blakeley (Microsoft), Rick Cattell (Sun Microsystems), William Cook (University of Texas at Austin), Robert Green (Versant) , and Alan Santos (Progress).
The panel addressed the ever open issue of the impedance mismatch, a problem which has existed ever since computers were used to persistently store data – in file systems or database management systems -, and where no fully satisfactory solutions have been found as of yet.
The complete panel transcript is available for free download (PDF)
“Today, I see two types of impedance mismatch problems,” says Jose Blakeley, a Partner Architect in the SQL Server Division at Microsoft. “(1) the application’s impedance mismatch problem, and (2) the impedance mismatch in data services.”
Alan Santos from data integration specialist Progress Software takes a different view: “Historically impedance mismatch has referred to the issues encountered when mapping data from a relational store into an object oriented data model. For some people, in some very practical ways, impedance mismatch is not an issue and has been solved with improvements in O/R mapping libraries and performance improvements in the runtime environments, as well as hardware itself.”
Rick Cattell, formerly Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems who has been instrumental in the foundation of J2EE, SQL Access/ODBC and JDBC, sees three solutions to overcome the mismatch: “The top three options for Java are JDBC, O/R mapping, and an ODBMS.”
But panelists differed when asked about their views on whether object-relational mappers, relational databases and object databases were a suitable solution to the “object persistence” problem.
The panel also attempted to define new areas of research and development in object persistence.
Microsoft’s Blakeley: “I would like to see technologies like the EDM, EntitySQL, and EF be absorbed natively by relational database systems.”
UT Austin’s William Cook, a father of Apple Script, Safe and Native Queries agreed and wished that “major database vendors implement OQL (or some variant, like HQL) as a native database interface to their databases.”
I reccomend it, it is a very informative readings!
Here are the questions at a glance:
Question 1: Do we still have an “impedance mismatch problem”?
Question 2: In terms of what you’re seeing used in the industry, how would you position the various options available for persistence for new projects?
Question 3: What are in your opinion the pros and cons of these existing solutions?
Question 4: Do you believe that Object Relational Mappers are a suitable solution to the “object persistence” problem? If yes why? If not, why?
Question 5: Do you believe that Relational Database systems are a suitable solution to the “object persistence” problem? If yes why? If not, why?
Question 6: Do you believe that Object Database systems are a suitable solution to the “object persistence” problem? If yes why? If not, why?
Question 7: What would you wish as a new research/development in the area of Object Persistence in the next 12 months?
Question 8: If you were all powerful and could have influenced technology adoption in the last 10 years, what would today’s typical project use as a persistence mechanism and why?
Question 9: Any parting words about this topic?
##
ICOODB 2008: trip report
I was invited to speak at ICOODB- the International Conference on Object Databases.
The conference took place on 13 and 14 of March in Berlin. I was there only on the 13.
I have to admit that I was surprised. It was very long time since I attended an Object Database conference in years! They seemed all gone. And now here it is…a surprise. The conference was a great succuess!
23 Speakers, 150 conference attendees from all over the world. Interesting presentation and interesting discussions.
In particular, a lot of discussion took place at the conference about the future direction of object databases. One main question was if new developments should be user driven or standards driven. Not definitely anwers were given.
This discussion was triggered in particular by the keynotes of Mike Card, (who chairs the ODBT group in OMG to advance object database standardization), and by Prof. Kazimierz Subieta (who is very active in the OMG ODBT group).
Mike Card in particular, advocated a more informal way for companies and individual to be involved in the OMG ODBT group, without necessarily taking part to all general OMG technical meetings. He simply asked for their input, and he would be willing to organize informal workshops.
I found this, a very useful suggestion which hopefully may allow more individuals and companies to be involved in the difficult process of finding a suitable object database standards (if any).
Anybody interested in that, should contact Mike Card at Syracuse Research Corporation (SRC).
The conference was perfectly well organized by the team of Stefan Edlich at TFH-Berlin. Stefan deserved the credit to “pull it out”. Jim Paterson played also an important role in helping Stefan with the conference program.
You can find the detailed conference program here
More information on the conference is available at the ICOODB web site
The topic of Java Object Persistence is as actual as ever…
I have therefore interviewed together with InfoQ.com’s Floyd Marinescu the following group of leading persistence solution architects on their views on the current State of the Union of object persistence with respect to Java:
Mike Keith: EJB co-spec lead, main architect of Oracle Toplink ORM
Ted Neward: Independent consultant, often blogging on ORM and persistence topics
Carl Rosenberger: lead architect of db4objects, open source embeddable object database
Craig Russell: Spec lead of Java Data Objects (JDO) JSR, architect of entity bean engine in Sun’s appservers prior to Glassfish
Here are the questions at a glance:
Question 1: Do we still have an “impedance mismatch problem”?
Question 2: In terms of what you’re seeing used in the industry, how would you position the various options available for persistence for new projects?
Question 3: What are in your opinion the pros and cons of these existing solutions?
Question 4: Do you believe that Object Relational Mappers are a suitable solution to the “object persistence” problem? If yes why? If not, why?
Question 5: Do you believe that Relational Database systems are a suitable solution to the “object persistence” problem? If yes why? If not, why?
Question 6: Do you believe that Object Database systems are a suitable solution to the “object persistence” problem? If yes why? If not, why?
Question 7: What would you wish as a new research/development in the area of Object Persistence in the next 12 months?
Question 8: If you were all powerful and could have influenced technology adoption in the last 10 years, what would today’s typical project use as a persistence mechanism and why?
Question 9: Any parting words about this topic?
The answers we got differ, but I believe all panelists agree that there is no silver bullet….
The complete panel transcript is available for free download (PDF)
##
On Wednesday Jan 16, 2008 Jonathan Schwartz, Chief Executive Officer and President, Sun Microsystems, Inc., announced in his blog that SUN is acquiring MySQL AB.
On 26 February 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced it has completed the acquisition of MySQL AB, for approximately $1 billion in total consideration.
Kevin Harvey, Chairman of the MySQL board of directors told InfoQ that there were two main drivers behind Sun’s purchase of MySQL ” it solidifies Sun’s role in the Web 2.0 datacenter, and it also confirms Sun’s position as a leading provider of open source software.”
I have asked three of our experts, Robert Green, Leon Guzenda, and Rick Cattell a few questions on this. Robert is responsible for defining Versant’s overall object database strategy, Leon is responsible for the Objectivity object database strategy. Rick worked for several years at Sun Microsystems, and now he is an independent consultant.
Q1. What does this announcement mean for the database market in general? and specifically will it have any impact on the object database market in your opinion? and if yes, how?
RCG> I think this announcement means that companies who were concerned about putting MySQL into their enterprise environments will now rethink things. If Oracle was not concerned before about the MySQL threat, it ought to be now. It is interesting to watch as people are beginning to pay for these products, previously perceived as “free”, in the form of services and value added capabilities(in MySQL’s case, better tooling). I don’t think there will be any direct impact to the OODB market other than the perpetuation of changing attitudes that what counts most is using the right tool for the job. It’s that change in attitude that’s having the greatest impact on the OODB market.
LG> MySQL is a conventional RDBMS built and sold using the open source model. Sun has traditionally been vendor neutral in its approach to DBMS sales, partnering with whichever DBMS company a joint customer expressed interest in. They have always had a strong partnership with Oracle, for instance. As Oracle also sells its product on IBM hardware, competing
directly with DB2, these partnerships are interesting in their complexity. Will Oracle shift more of its attention to sales on HP
equipment rather than Sun’s. I doubt it. However, there will undoubtedly be some pressure on Sun’s sales people to work new deals that can be 100% handled and supported by Sun.
I can’t remember a situation where Objectivity/DB has been in competition with MySQL as we tackle completely different kinds of application, so this won’t affect us directly. Likewise, our customers almost all find us without Sun’s help, so I don’t think it matters that much to us.
RC> Sun has had a good adoption rate on its open source offerings: their application server, Open Office, Java, and so on. I believe that the MySQL acquisition was exactly the right move for Sun at this point, and also will be a big benefit to open source users.
The acquisition will be good for open source users because Sun will push MySQL innovation in new directions, Sun will provide long-term stability for MySQL, which has been under attack from Oracle (who recently acquired both InnoDB and SleepyCat, the “engines” for MySQL), and there will be synergy and benefits between MySQL and Sun’s current open source
offerings, e.g. the application server and development tools.
The acquisition was exactly the right move for Sun because unlike Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, Sun did not have a strong database component in its software stack. Sun’s software stack is open source (again, the right move I believe). Unlike Sun’s current database offerings with PostgreSQL and Java DB, which are only strong in narrow markets,
MySQL has a very large following in a wide variety of applications. MySQL thereby gives Sun a complete software stack with “best of breed” solutions pretty much across the board. It also allows Sun to tune that software stack for its platform (for example, optimizing MySQL for Sun Solaris, and utilizing innovative proprietary hardware features).
As for the object database market, I don’t see the acquisition having a big impact one way or the other. Object database systems are being used in different markets than relational database systems, for the most part. However, Sun’s obvious support of open source is a “shot in the arm” for open source databases. Also, Sun’s Java Persistence API and
the adoption of object/relational mappings is a boost for object databases, because these allow object databases to be more easily and naturally substituted for relational databases in application servers and web servers. Sun will likely do some tuning of MySQL with JavaPersistence.
By the way, I recently left Sun to do independent consulting as Cattell.Net, so the opinions and speculations I express here are purely my own. But as I mentioned, I believe the MySQL acquisition was a great move, so I remain positive on Sun’s future if they play their cards right with the MySQL technology and customers over the next coupleyears.
Q2. Schwartz in his blog says “….customers confirmed what we’ve known for years – that MySQL is by far the most popular platform on which modern developers are creating network services. From Facebook, Google and Sina.com to banks and telecommunications companies, architects looking for performance, productivity and innovation have turned to MySQL.”
Will it change anything in this respect?
RCG> Well, I would hope the Schwartz believes in his message. The fact that Sun spent 1B for MySQL would suggest that he does not believe his perceptions will change for the worse, but I would hedge with a quote by Niels Bohr, “Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future”. The key is to provide value, so far MySQL has done this well, whether or not they have “peaked”, time will tell.
There are public declarations about where the technology succeeds and where it begins to break down, if they want to expand, there are known issues that must be addressed. The future is wrought with challenges due to unbounded data growth, coupled with concurrency and complexity. In the future, other drivers like “Green” abilities will outweigh the ability to simply get the job done. Almost anything can be forced to work, but when you have to decide between something that works on 1000 servers or 400, your decisions will be heavily influenced by these other factors.
I would predict, in the future, value will be driven by “Green” technologies, much like they have in the semi-conductor industry over the last decade.
LG> It might for ODBMSs that are targetting traditional IT applications.
Q3. Schwartz in his blog says: “The adoption of MySQL across the globe is nothing short of breathtaking. They are the root stock from which an enormous portion of the web economy springs”
Is this specific to MySQL or else?
RCG> I think the open source movement as a whole is the stock, MySQL is simply one of the branches, certainly big enough to hang a hammock without fear of breakage.
LG> Apart from the usual pressure to use the vendor’s technology, I can’t see Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server shops suddenly switching everything to MyQL because Sun now owns it. I think it more likely that MySQL users will be pressured to switch to Sun’s hardware offerings.
RC> I believe Schwartz is right: the adoption of MySQL has been incredible, particularly among the fast-growing web companies. This is another
reason that the MySQL acquisition was a smart move: it gives Sun an opening into these companies. Sun has suffered somewhat because these fast-growing companies have generally not bought Sun hardware,
support, or software. Sun has only done well with the traditional and more conservative “enterprise” companies. Now Sun has a complete open source software stack, gives customers a choice of operating systems, and offers competitive hardware with both Intel and SPARC architectures.
Sun is now well aligned with the fastest-growing sectors of the Internet market.
You might question how “adoption” translates into dollars for Sun, since open source is free. But I believe Sun is in a good position to monetize widespread adoption of its software stack, through support revenue, upgrade revenue, and synergy between software and hardware sales.
Q4. Schwartz in his blog says: ” So what are we announcing today? That in addition to acquiring MySQL, Sun will be unveiling new global support offerings into the MySQL marketplace. We’ll be investing in both the community, and the marketplace – to accelerate the industry’s phase change away from proprietary technology to the new world of open web platform”
What`s the meaning for the open source community in the database market?
RCG> Maybe this is supposed to be a trick question. I think the meaning is the same as it is to other software markets. The sum of the constituents that subscribe to it’s use and adoption. Software must increasingly provide value to
compete, even free and open software. If there is no appreciable value, then it will have no constituency. The key is to figure out where you are in that value curve and how best to drive adoption given your particular situation.
LG> Let’s not forget that Sun moved to the open source model as its own efforts started to lag the faster moving community. While this matters a lot in some highly dynamic and emerging markets it can even be a problem in enterprise applications. Red Hat was changing so rapidly at one point that equipment manufacturers and rigorous IT shops were having problems
achieving a stable base, so red Hat introduced the more pricey Enterprise Edition. Sun is probably aiming to make its money from services and bundled sales. Not all open source offerings have become commercially viable, but MySQL is a notable exception
Q5. Schwartz in his blog says: “The good news is Sun is already committed to the business model at the heart of MySQL’s success -”
Is MySQL business model usable/adaptable also for ODBMS? How?
RCG> As stated above, it’s identifiable value that is important. The MySQL business model for the sake of the MySQL business model is a non-starter. If you have a technology that has non-commoditized value, there are other equally viable business models. The ODBMS company I can think of that most closely matches the MySQL model is db4o, and they have a database value which is highly commoditized, so I guess that business model makes sense for them. Some of the other ODBMS companies have highly differentiated value, so they do not depend on a MySQL like business model. So, it appears that many business models work.
Which one works best is another question altogether. Ultimately, a business model has the goal of returning profits to it’s owners and shareholders in a competitive landscape. So, what is the best company/business model, one that has 50% of a 10B software market and only earns 60M/yr for shareholders ( at a loss ) or one that has .005% of the market and earns 25M/yr for their shareholders at a profit? Again, I think the important point is understanding where you are in the value curve to help establish the business model that makes the most sense. I think this is one of the places that Sun has fallen short in the past. They have been trying to do the MySQL business model, but have failed to really understand where their various offering reside in the value curve. I could be wrong or rather that could be changing – perhaps they understand it very well and it’s just more complex than a first glance. Perhaps software is the commodity and hardware is the value add and they are looking for MySQL to be the catalyst for adoption much like Hibernate was for JBoss.
LG> There are currently about a half dozen ODBMS products sold with conventional licensing and a similar number of open source ones. As in the early days of ODBMSs, where there were about three times more products than the market could sustain, I doubt that many of the open source ones will survive in a crowded, highly specialized market. RDBMSs
need a lot more support, e.g. for database administration, than ODBMSs, so the split between license sales and services is dramatically different for the two technologies. The open source ODBMSs will need to spread out into applications to earn significant revenue from services. At that point, if they’re in the wrong vertical they’ll be competing head on with the big players.
RC> An excellent question. Many companies have admired MySQL’s success and wondered how to emulate it. In my mind, MySQL is the only company in the last 20 years to successfully challenge the domination of Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft in the database market. Other database companies have failed, have been acquired, or have been relegated to a smaller niche
market.
Object database companies have generally been in the last category. Partly that was a matter of timing: object databases came out too early to “ride the wave” of the Internet, Java, and open source. Customers feared compromising the integrity of their databases using an “unsafe” C++ object database, and object databases met stiff competition from the
big relational players, both in marketing dollars and in inertia behind existing relational database installations.
I see that changing somewhat going forward. Although I think it’s too late for a new database contender to ride the “open source” wave in the way that MySQL did, and I still don’t see object databases challenging relational databases in mainstream markets, I do see that an open-source Java object database system could grow significantly, especially in
applications where relational databases are not well suited.
Q6. Specially to your company, do you see MySQL as an example you wish to follow?
RCG> Absolutely! The first company that comes along and offers 1B to acquire Versant, we will accept the deal on behalf of our shareholders 😉 Seriously, to remain viable, companies must constantly consider where they reside on the
value curve and adjust business models accordingly. Again, the future is especially hard to predict, should Versant decide it is prudent to switch business models, we would most certainly inform the public as is required by any publically traded corporation.
LG> No, not for pure ODBMSs. It will be interesting to track the commercial progress of db4objects, objectdb and other open source ODBMSs.
##
I have been working together with Floyd Marinescu, editor of InfoQ.com, and produced a virtual panel asking a group of leading persistence solution architects their views on the current state of the union in persistence in the Java community.
The Panelists we interviewed are:
– Mike Keith : EJB co-spec lead, main architect of Oracle Toplink ORM
–Ted Neward: Independent consultant, often blogging on ORM and persistence topics
– Carl Rosenberger: lead architect of db4objects, open source embeddable object database
– Craig Russell: Formerly the spec lead of Java Data Objects (JDO) JSR, architect of entity bean engine in Sun’s appservers prior to Glassfish
The complete panel transcript is also available for free download (PDF). It is an interesting readings…
Roberto V. Zicari
I have received some information from Mrs. Charlotte W. Wales (The MITRE Corporation) related to the OMG Object Database Technology Users and Vendors Roundtable, which took place on 11 December 2007 at the OMG meeting in Burlingame, CA. I have listed it below as I have received it.
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News from OMG Object Database Technology Users and Vendors Roundtable, 11 December 2007
All the hard work that went into preparation of the Next Generation Object Database Standardization White Paper, augmented by the publicity received here at the ODBMS.ORG Portal (in the Forum), resulted in a successful Users and Vendors Users and Vendors Roundtable at the OMG meeting last December in Burlingame, CA. The meeting attendance of 14 was a healthy mixture of users and vendors representing Objectivity, Versant, Gemstone, db4Objects, and Fujitsu (used to market Jasmine) Tibco, Progeny, Boeing, TUMunich, Kangwon Univ (Korea), PJI, Syracuse Research, and MITRE.
After a welcome and introductions conducted by Char Wales (MITRE), Mike Card (Syracuse Research), calling in from his sickbed in New York, introduced the Next Generation Object Database Standardization effort, providing important historical and technical background including his role in the ODMG.
Prof K. Subieta (PJIT) then gave a presentation on his Stack Based Approach to Object Databases. Anat Ghafni (db4Objects) presented and summarized the high points of the sometimes lively discussions that appeared in the ODBMS Forum in response to the White Paper. These presentations laid an excellent groundwork for discussions during the ensuing Roundtable, moderated by Mike Card and Char Wales, which fulfilled the Roundtable’s “Objectives” – a completely open Forum, with nothing off limits.
The conclusion of the Roundtable was an agreement to work on a Roadmap for achieving the goal of an adopted Next Generation Object Database Standard with vendor implementations by 2009. Facilitated by teleconferences – the plan is to have an initial version of this Roadmap ready in time to present at the ICOODB 2008 ICOODB 2008 conference in Berlin and at the OMG Technical Committee meeting in Washington, DC, both scheduled for the same week in March 2008. If things proceed well, it is hoped that an RFP will be ready for issuance by June 2008, and – with luck – initial
submissions ready for review by the end of this year.
For the benefit of those who have not been part of this “from the beginning”, a recap of a few of the significant events within OMG leading to the Roundtable last December is in order:
-Sep 03: 1st Object Database Working Group meeting; idea of improving existing ODMG3.0 standard introduced.
-Nov 03, Apr ’04: “Socialization” of this idea within OMG.
-May 04: Morgan-Kauffman grants OMG the right “to publish, revise, disseminate and use original and revised versions of the Standard as an OMG specification (the “Specification”)” subject to limitations detailed in letter to OMG.
-Sep 05: ODBMS.ORG portal launched.
-Dec 06: Decision to expand scope to Object Database Technology (including modeling and mappings between object and relational).
-Feb 06: Object Database Technology Request for Information (RFI) Issued.
-Jun 06: Report summarizing 11 RFI responses identified three ways forward.
-Sep 07: Next-Generation Object Database Standardization White Paper issued.
Charlotte W. Wales
In memory of Brian Blaha
A tragedy occured to Michael Blaha`s family,
Michael is a database colleague and contributor to ODBMS.ORG.
I´d thought to share this with the community.
Roberto V. Zicari
Brian Blaha, the son of Michael Blaha, died on July 10, 2007 after a long and brave struggle with leukemia. He was halfway through his doctoral work in Computer Engineering when stricken with the disease. Brian was a brilliant student having received both his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering in 4 years while compiling a nearly 4.0 GPA.
We have established a scholarship fund in Computer Engineering in his honor. Those who are interested can directly contact the University of Missouri-Rolla, 212 Parker Hall, Rolla, MO 65409, USA. If there are any questions Connie Eggert (eggertc AT umr.edu) can answer them.
For tax purposes, contributions are charitable donations and the university will acknowledge them.
Grady Booch on Innovation
Happy New Year!
One of the main driving force which influenced the introduction of new generation database systems, such as ODBMS, was Object Oriented Programming (OOP). For OOP a number of OO methodologies have been introduced. I had the pleasure to interview Grady Booch.
Grady Booch is IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist, Rational Software, IBM.
Grady is recognized internationally for his innovative work on software architecture and software engineering. A renowned visionary, he has devoted his life’s work to improving the effectiveness of software developers worldwide. Booch is one of the original authors of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and has served as architect and architectural mentor for numerous complex software-intensive systems around the world in just about every domain imaginable.
Grady received his bachelor of science from the United States Air Force Academy in 1977 and his master of science in electrical engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1979.
1. What is “Innovation” for you?
Innovation means creating something new, making a connection that has never been made before, discovering some underlying truth that has remained hidden. Innovation is all about thinking out of the box and destroying rigid assumptions. Innovation involves finding the simple beauty in that which is complex.
2. Who are your favorite innovators?
Edison and Feynman are at the top of my list.
3. What do you consider are the most promising innovations of the last 3 years?
In hardware, I’d say it’s the emergence of commercially viable multicore processors; in software, the growing standards for the semantic web; in society, the rise of social networking and blogging. for me personally, my exposure to NVC and the work of Marshall Rosenberg and Gail Taylor.
4. What does it help to become a successful innovator?
Three things: a manical, passionate focus, a lack of fear of failure, and a willingness to press on even when the structures and dynamics around you resist you.
5. Is there a price to pay to be an innovator? Which one?
A true innovator is often a stranger in a strange land. But then again, that’s a price only a non-innovator would care about.
6. What are the rewards to be an innovator?
The privilege of being able to create, to discover, to participate in that journey: these are the rewards that for me are sufficient unto themselves.
7. What are in your opinion the top 3 criteria for successful innovation?
I have no idea how to answer that question. There are as many paths to innovation as there are innovations themselves..
8. What would you recommend to young people who wish to pursue innovation?
The innovators I admire the most are whole people, not just sages in their own domain. So, my advice is to enjoy life, live fully – and the innovation will find you.
9. In your opinion how can we create a culture that supports and sustains innovation?
A culture that celebrates play is one that can support and sustain innovation.
10. What do you think stops/slows down innovation?
Rule-based organizations and people who view the world as in terms of absolute right and wrong are the worst inhibitors to innovation.
10+1 .Do you think becoming an innovator can be taught? If yes, how?
Yes, again by encouraging a sense of play in learning.
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Thank you for your questions…they are among the more interesting I’ve had thrown at me in a while 😉
GB.
