Goodbye, MySQL!

Finnish programmer Monty has three children named My, Maria, Max.

The three children are very lucky because their father permanently "engraved" their names on three database products:

MySQL

MaxDB

MariaDB

This father is Michael Widenius, the main author of MySQL, and he is often called Monty.

Today we will talk about why Monty created MySQL and how MySQL developed into the most popular open source database in the world.

Programmer

Monty was born in Helsinki, Finland in 1962. In 1978, at the age of 16, he discovered a high-tech product: the ABC80 computer.

The CPU of this computer is only 4M Hz, and the memory is only 8K, but for Monty, who has only played with programmable calculators, this is a real computer.

So Monty found a “work-study” job: paving asphalt on the streets of Helsinki. Although he made a lot of money, it was not enough. Monty’s father paid half of the money and successfully took ABC80 back. Home.

Since then, Monty has been "huddling" with this computer all day.

Monty is an out-and-out programming genius. He can easily handle things that are very difficult for others. For him, programming is like reading an interesting novel or playing a game. Hours passed.

Since there is not much software on ABC80, Monty tried his best to implement some popular games on the game console on this machine in assembly language!

(Space Invaders)

（Pacman）

It can be seen how powerful the game is!

Two years later, Monty upgraded ABC80 to ABC800. At this time, Monty was no longer satisfied with being a game Boy, and started to develop real software on it, such as:

Word processor

Hard Disk Controller

Tape backup

......

In a speech, Monty said: That was really a good old time. If you want to use a computer, you have to learn all aspects of computer hardware and software from the bottom. For modern programmers, there is no such opportunity.

"Taoyuan trio"

Since ABC computers are made in Sweden, many accessories are only available in Sweden. Monty often goes to Sweden to buy accessories by boat. Once when he went to buy memory, Monty met Allan Larsson.

Allan ran a computer store and had a consulting company called TcX. Monty gradually became acquainted with him.

After learning that Monty is a programming genius, Allan gave him a database program and asked him to develop a software for the customer based on this database.

Monty took a look at the database program and found that the program was too badly written, difficult to understand, and difficult to maintain. In that case, it's better to rewrite one.

Daniel is so headstrong.

The database program written by Monty is called Unireg. It was originally written in Basic in ABC800. In 1983, Monty rewritten it in C language so that it could run on a powerful machine with 2M memory.

This is the interface of Unireg, plain text, a bit like a printer format. Although it's a bit ugly, you can easily create, update the data in the database, and generate reports.

Neither Monty nor Allan would have imagined that this crude-looking database would soar into the sky in the future and become the mainstay of the software world: MySQL!

With the database, Allan has brought more work. As the only developer of TcX, Monty not only develops customer applications, but also spends a lot of time to improve Unireg.

In 1985, Monty and Allan simply co-founded a company called TCX DataKonsult AB, which focused on the field of data warehousing. Monty ported Unireg to a more powerful Sun workstation in order to handle larger-scale data.

How large is it? It is about one million rows of data per month.

It can be seen that the Unireg database at this time is already quite good and can handle big data!

During this period, Monty met David Axmark again, and the two met late, often discussing technical issues together and calling late into the night.

David is a big fan of free software, and he will have a significant impact on MySQL's open source model and profit model in the future.

Monty, David, and Allan are like the brothers of the "Taoyuan Sanyi". From now on, they will join hands to open a new history.

MySQL comes out

I don’t know how much money Monty and Allan have made with Unireg. TcX, a small company, should live better.

If this development continues, it is estimated that MySQL will not be born.

In the mid to late 1990s, the booming Internet will bring Monty and them an unprecedented challenge, and of course it also brings unprecedented opportunities.

In 1994, the client hoped that TcX would start developing Web applications based on Unireg. Unfortunately, the design shortcomings of the Unireg desktop software were exposed: it does not support SQL and cannot be effectively integrated with Web pages.

Either stick to the desktop software and slowly fall behind the times, or take the initiative to embrace the Web, Monty and TcX have come to a crossroads.

At this time, Monty discovered the open source miniSQL (mSQL for short). After some research, Monty discovered that the most terrible problem of mSQL is that it does not support indexes and has poor performance.

Monty contacted the author of mSQL and asked him if he could modify mSQL to use Unireg's index. The author of mSQL was busy developing mSQL 2.0, had already designed an index scheme, and refused.

Do it yourself, with plenty of food and clothing, Monty is determined to implement his own database.

A year later, in January 1995, MySQL 1.0 supporting SQL interface, indexing, and C/S architecture came out.

The avid open source software enthusiast David immediately found Monty and Allan and put pressure on them, hoping that MySQL could be open source.

But after open source, everyone can use it, how can I make money?

David thought of a wonderful note: dual permission

Customers can use MySQL in an open source manner without paying.

However, if customers use MySQL in their own products and want to sell their own products through closed-source methods, then sorry, they need to pay for a commercial license.

In this way, not only can the user of the software be expanded, the income will not be lost.

15 minutes and 30,000 emails

MySQL is fortunate, it has set foot on the Internet: Web sites have sprung up like mushrooms, every site needs a free database, MySQL just fills this gap .

At that time, the main languages for building websites were PHP and Perl. These programmers also made a lot of publicity about MySQL: simplicity, ease of use, and high performance.

Monty and David set a goal: to allow users to run MySQL within 15 minutes after downloading MySQL . In the era when RPM, DEB and other installation packages are popular now, 15 minutes sounds very long, but in 1996, usually Need to install from the source code, a little problem, it will take hours.

For these 15 minutes, Monty has worked hard to compile and install different versions of MySQL on 8-10 operating systems.

Monty is very responsible to users. He responded to more than 30,000 emails to solve everyone's questions in the 5 years before MySQL came out.

David is not idle, attending various meetings non-stop, promoting MySQL everywhere, and he spends more time on the plane than at home.

Free MySQL has gradually become the first choice for building a website. Together with Apache and Linux, the famous LAMP is formed.

50 million USD

By 1999, MySQL had been noticed by some people, and they wanted to buy MySQL at a high price of US$50 million.

If I were short-sighted, I would sell it in all likelihood. What an attractive offer. After I sold it, I would be financially free!

But Monty has a bigger vision: do something to change the world.

They didn't want to lose control of the company, so they rejected the acquisition.

As time goes by, MySQL has grown bigger and bigger. The company has grown from 3 people to 15 people. There are more and more customers, and the required functions have increased. MySQL needs more people to do technical support, document writing, and sales.

Competitors such as PostgresSQL have also appeared in the market. If no investment is introduced and the previous income grows slowly, MySQL will be killed by the era of rapid development sooner or later.

In 2001, Mårten Mickos was hired as MySQL CEO to talk to investors specifically, and finally received 4 million Euros of A round of financing from venture capital, only transferred 10% of the equity, and the control is still in the hands of Monty.

MySQL has since entered the fast lane of development. By 2003, in only two years, the number of MySQL installations had doubled to 4 million, making it the most popular open source database in the world.

This year, MySQL received another $19.5 million in Series B financing.

Dark battle with Oracle

Oracle is the absolute leader in the database field and dominates the enterprise database market, but it cannot do free and open source MySQL in the Web field.

Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Quora, Dropbox, Youtube, Twitter and other IT giants do not use Oracle. They chose MySQL unanimously because they don’t have to pay a huge license fee to Oracle, and they can modify the source code to suit their own scenarios.

Even worse, MySQL is killing the enterprise market from the Web field. Many heavyweight customers have switched from Oracle to free MySQL, which poses a huge threat to Oracle.

In 2006, Oracle tried to acquire MySQL, but failed.

Larry Ellison said arrogantly:

It (MySQL) is just a small company with annual revenue of 30 to 40 million yuan, while our Oracle revenue is 15 billion!

We only acquire companies that have commercial value, and MySQL is not on our list of acquisitions.

That being said, Oracle is constantly digging into the corner of MySQL.

In 2005, Oracle acquired a Finnish company called innobase, which provided MySQL with the InnoDB engine that supports transaction processing.

A year later, Oracle bought Sleepycat, which provided MySQL with the Berkeley DB transaction engine.

M&A

In 2008, MySQL, with an annual revenue of 75 million US dollars, faced a choice: Is it going to go public? Or sell it at a good price?

After some discussion, Mårten Mickos, Monty, David and others chose Sun because:

1. Sun is a technology-oriented company

2. Sun is the promoter of the open source movement and there is no risk of turning MySQL into closed source software.

In January 2008, MySQL was sold to Sun for US$1 billion, and Monty also became one of the ten richest people in Finland this year with this income.

But people are not as good as the sky. What makes people smile is that only a year later, Sun was acquired by Oracle again!

MySQL still did not escape Oracle's palm.

The outlook for MySQL suddenly faded, Monty said:

"Many core MySQL developers, including myself, don't believe that Oracle can treat MySQL well. We must ensure that MySQL's code is completely open source and will always be open source."

In 2009, in response to Oracle's acquisition of Sun, Monty immediately created a MySQL branch: MariaDB, which is compatible with MySQL and is completely open source. A large number of core developers followed Monty, left MySQL and joined MariaDB.