OStatic

Infobright announced last week that a version of its data warehouse product is now being released under an open-source license (the GNU General Public License, version 2). Infobright also announced that it had raised a $10 million round of venture capital funding, and that one of the investors is Sun Microsystems.

Database company Continuent announced the availability of its Tungsten stack earlier today. These programs are meant to improve the replication capabilities of the open-source MySQL database, with an eye toward other database products in the near future. Tungsten is apparently written in Java, allowing it to run on a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, and the Macintosh.

Members of various open-source database communities will get together in mid-November for the first-ever OpenSQL camp. The free conference, which has room for 150 attendees, will be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is meant to help the members of all open-source database projects to learn from one another. Potential participants are encouraged to register on the Wiki, as well as to propose conference talks. Organizers want the camp to make it possible for participants to learn, to participate, to contribute, and to write code.

When you're working with a commercial software company, it's easy to keep up with their latest news: Between the company's Web sites, e-mail newsletters, conferences, and (increasingly) blogs, you can find out what is happening, and prepare yourself accordingly. Life in the open-source world is quite a bit messier, of course, in that there often isn't any central location or source for news. One of the key tools that the open-source community uses to keep in touch is blogs -- but it's not always easy to find all of the blogs on the subjects that interest you. That's where blog planets come in, providing a one-stop aggregation of many blogs on a particular subject.

Many of the best-known PostgreSQL hackers joined together several weeks ago for the annual PGCon, a conference dedicated to all things PostgreSQL. I've finally had a chance to review some of the talks and slides from that conference, and it not only gives me confidence in what PostgreSQL can do today, but also where it is headed in the coming years. Between scaling, geographic information systems, compatibility with other databases, and configuration management, presentations at PGCon contained a wealth of information for anyone using PostgreSQL.

For many years, MySQL has been the best-known open-source relational database. Sun bought it and the company earlier this year, leading many to wonder what the business strategy would be. This week, the CEO of MySQL revealed part of that strategy -- the introduction of proprietary add-ons that will only be distributed to commercial customers.

Reaction in the open-source world has been quite negative. What does this shift mean for MySQL?