Patrik Backman is a Partner Manager at MySQL and he is currently handling the partnership between MySQL and SAP. This partnership has the goal, to further develop the MySQL database so that it will become able to run SAP enterprise systems and solution in the future. The other aim of the co-operation is to promote the open source MaxDB enterprise
database, previously known as SAP DB, worldwide. Patrik is a native Finn, living in Helsinki.

Subject

MySQL and MySQL AB

MySQL AB is a Swedish privately held company that was founded by the developers behind the MySQL database. The company own the code base to MySQL and the MySQL Trademark, and has since its start released the product Open Source. MySQL AB releases the MySQL database open source under the GPL and the company also provides commercial licenses to its products for those who don't want to be bound by the GPL license. The basic logic behind the licensing scheme is: "If you are free - we are free, if you are commercial - we are commercial". On top of commercial licenses, which provide about 50% of the revenues, MySQL AB gets its income from Support, Consulting and Training.

MySQL is part of all major Linux distributions. The installation estimate overall is currently some 4 millions, and each day over 30.000 more are downloaded. In some measurements MySQL can even compete with Oracle: It is more used in Germany (according to iX Magazine) and on Google "MySQL" beats "Oracle" in number of hits. MySQL estimates that it has 20% of all database use, but only 0.02% of the total revenues.

MySQL development

The majority of MySQL popularity grew from the rein of MySQL 3.23, which already provided the users with a feature set that covered most needs. It offered transactions and replications as new features and was released in the summer 2000. The present version is 4.0 which offers query cache (resulting in a huge performance increase), Union command, dual threaded replication, full text search and embedded server capabilities. The version 4.1 is now as beta release and it offers Sub-Queries, Prepared Statements, OpenGIS and more. The coming version 5.0 will include Stored Procedures, Cursors, etc and Views are being developed for the 5.1 release.

MySQL SAP Partnership

In May 2003 MySQL started a partnership with SAP with the aim of getting MySQL developed to be able to run heavy-duty SAP Enterprise systems and solutions. As another part of the partnership, MySQL acquired the commercial rights to SAP DB, which now has been rebranded MaxDB by MySQL. MaxDB is a full scale enterprise database and will be offered

Open Source under the GPL by MySQL before the end of 2003. With MaxDB in its portfolio MySQL can act as a "one-stop-shopping" place for databases: If you need a fast, reliable and easy to use database we offer MySQL, and if you need an enterprise scale feature set we have

MaxDB for you. Interoperability features are currently being developed for MaxDB, and when ready these will offer the possibility to use MySQL clients with the MaxDB server and it will also be possible to set up a replication between a MySQL server and a MaxDB server in either direction.