This week Sun Microsystems announced an agreement to acquire MySQL, makers of the most popular open source database platform. This comes much to the dismay of open source zealots and sweaty nerds everywhere, who are afraid their beloved dolphin may end up in Sun’s enterprise tuna salad.

Sun has had a rocky past with the open source community, and tends to garner mixed reviews when they attempt to make inroads into open source.

Continue reading for more insight into Sun’s past open source shenanigans and what this deal might mean for the future of web developer’s favorite database platform.

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Welcome back to my unauthorized look into the seedy underbelly of a web application. (did you miss part one?) Today: the database. The model. The schema. The sick, twisted, gang of data that lurks beneath the surface of nearly every web application. This isn’t for the faint of heart, so if you can’t bear to imagine your precious information being crammed feet-first into a database, I understand. Otherwise, read on for the thrilling story of a dictator with some complex data modeling issues. Read the rest of this entry »