pbxt-discuss team mailing list archive

[Henrik Ingo <henrik.ingo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 1:27 AM, Paul McCullagh
<paul.mccullagh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In the end it always comes down to the business case. We can't be idealistic about that.
>
> The bottom line on PBXT is that it wasn't a loss, but we didn't make much of a profit either.
>
> But that was not the interesting part. The real interesting part was working together with MySQL and Sun, and we were doing that.
>
> Just imagine if MySQL had IPO'ed. Just imagine if Oracle had not bought Sun...
>

You are right that the PBXT story in the end is defined by Oracle and
InnoDB. But you forget that Sun was not the only bidder in 2008. Even
without Sun there wouldn't have been an IPO. (The estimated IPO value
was hundreds of millions lower than the acquisition price, which is
quite normal.) In the end, all scenarios pretty much end with Oracle
acquiring MySQL. (Whether EU, or even US DoJ, would have then allowed
Oracle to acquire MySQL in 2008 is another question. MySQL gained a
lot in competitive importance during the Sun year, so it very well
could have.)

So in a sense it is precisely the case that PBXT came into the
limelight because Oracle bought InnoDB, and faded because Oracle
bought MySQL. If you were a Star Trek movie, you would be wearing a
red shirt :-)

Nevertheless, I was always fascinated by the beauty of the PBXT
architecture as well. In fact it was the first engine / database
architecture that I felt I could really understand well. (NDB was hard
to really understand, and InnoDB I become better acquinted with only
later. Of Falcon I remember just Robin Schumacher explaining how many
threads it has... it was important to point out it was multi-threaded
:-)

Btw, there's a strong rumour from a source that may or may not be
reliable that PBXT was actually very close to becoming part of
Sun/MySQL the day Oracle bought Sun. You probably can't comment on
that, but if true, it's a very interesting case of alternative
universes.

> But, if that is the bottom line, then I am pleased to say, there is a bonus on top of it all. I have met a lot of great people and made some very good friends!
>
> We'll, meet again and talk about the "old times" soon enough ;)

I'm glad to have contributed to this bonus and apparently I
accidentally also contributed to the real bottom line. Which is a fun
story that we can talk about next time we meet face to face :-)

henrik