Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Jonathon Schwartz hints a MySQL cloud

Robert Scoble interviewed Jonathan Schwartz today using his ultracool Nokia N95/Qik personal broadcasting package. During that interview, Jonathan made an interesting non-announcement. It seems, he notes, a natural fit that a data center expert like Sun could leverage their new highly scalable database environment, MySQL, to build a MySQL cloud service.

I think this is would be awesome; not only because it forces Oracle to consider getting into the same market (thus potentially creating a competitive commodity database service market), but also because it opens all kinds of possibilities for add-on capabilities that might not be economically feasible to develop in a traditional enterprise sales model.

Here's my only suggestion to my former boss, Mr. Schwartz. Buy Endeca. Not because they own the ecommerce search for most combination "bricks-and-mortar"/online retailers (they do), but because the technology has been developed in such a way that it can be used as tag-based search for just about any data source. (They don't present it that way, but I got an in depth demo, and that is what it is.) What I imagine would be a competitive advantage for Sun/MySQL would be a cost-per-byte data source with both SQL and tag-based or unstructured querying. Buy Endeca!

OK, soon we will have capacity, storage and databases in the cloud. Who wants to be first in the "System Management as a Service" game?

No comments: