pbxt-discuss team mailing list archive

[Paul McCullagh <paul.mccullagh@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mar 10, 2012, at 7:30 PM, Henrik Ingo wrote:

> 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.

Well, we certainly didn't see it that way. But maybe as an MySQL insider it was more obvious.

> (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 :-)

And like the red shirt wearers, they don't realize they are marked for termination... ;)

> 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.

Yes, the design remains fairly simple. But, of course, the devil is in the detail!

But it is the simple design that made it pretty easy to implement engine level replication.

Bi-directional replication could also be added without too much effort.

> (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.

Hmmm, where there is smoke, there is fire...

> 
>> 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 :-)

I look forward to that too.

Have a great time at the conference to all of you (except Tim) :)