Oh dear. History appears to be repeating itself.
Some years ago Sun bought the Clustra database product. I was a big fan, and had a great relationship with the company. The sale made sense, but Sun just didn’t know what it had bought, and buried it deep inside another product.
I held out a bit of hope they’d actually seen the light when there were noises in 2005 about Sun coming out with it’s own database product, but sadly I (and perhaps a few folk in Trondheim, Norway) were disappointed when they simply re-badged PostgreSQL.
Now they’ve bought MySQL (See here and here). Amusingly MySQL bought NDB, a telecoms database product from Ericsson’s labs, that was attempting similar things as Clustra, but far less effectively. So now with Sun having bought MySQL, perhaps if they’ve finally found a way to capitalise properly on their investments, they’ll bring Clustra out of retirement and pop it in to MySQL as a distributed storage engine.
But I’m far too cynical and long in the tooth for that. Much as Computer Associates have an eery ability to buy products and then complicate it beyond all rhyme and reason so it barely resembles the product they bought (Some perverted Midas touch), Sun just bury things like accidental squirrels.
Don’t get me wrong, MySQL is a great product. But it’s not my choice for enterprise database platforms: It’s missing too many features for that, and is a little too esoteric in how it solves certainly problems to ever seriously threaten that market, or command serious enterprise money. MSSQL, DB2, Sybase and their ilk have that licked.
So turning into a solid revenue stream will be difficult for Sun. Perhaps Sun will do the sensible thing and leave it be as a separate entity, continue to do what it does best, and just turn over the Clustra code and forget they ever bought it.
A geek can hope, can’t he?
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