Michael Widenius

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Michael Widenius
Michael "Monty" Widenius at MariaDB's Developers Unconference 2019 in New York City 03.jpg
Michael "Monty" Widenius, 2019
Born
Ulf Michael Widenius

(1962-03-03) 3 March 1962 (age 62)
Helsinki, Finland
Other namesMonty
Occupations
  • CTO of the MariaDB Corporation AB
  • Co-founder of MySQL AB
  • Author of the MySQL server and MariaDB fork
  • General partner at OpenOcean
Children3, My, Max and Maria, whose names inspired MySQL, MaxDB and MariaDB.
Website monty-says.blogspot.com

Ulf Michael Widenius (born 3 March 1962), also known as Monty, is a Finnish software programmer. He is the main author of the original version of the open source MySQL database, a founding member of the MySQL AB company and CTO of the MariaDB Corporation AB. Additionally, he is a founder and general partner at venture capital firm OpenOcean.

Contents

Biography

Early years

Born in Helsinki, Finland, Widenius went to the co-educational school Broban, which was first merged into Minervaskolan and later to Lönnbeckska gymnasiet. After dropping out of Helsinki University of Technology, Widenius started working for Tapio Laakso Oy in 1981. In 1985 he founded TCX DataKonsult AB (a Swedish data warehousing company) with Allan Larsson. [1] In 1995 he began writing the first version of the MySQL database with David Axmark, released in 1996. He is the co-author of the MySQL Reference Manual, published by O'Reilly in June 2002; and in 2003 he was awarded the Finnish Software Entrepreneur of the Year prize. [2]

Until MySQL AB's sale to Sun Microsystems in 2008, [3] he was the chief technical officer of MySQL AB. After the acquisition, he remained one of the primary forces behind the ongoing development of MySQL. [4]

MySQL acquired by Sun

Widenius sold MySQL to Sun in January 2008, earning about €16.6 million in capital gains in 2008 (€16.8 million total income), making him one of the top 10 highest earners in Finland that year. [5] [6]

After Sun

In 2008, Widenius established venture capital firm OpenOcean with his MySQL AB colleague Patrik Backman and early advisors Tom Henriksson and Ralf Wahlsten. [7]

On 5 February 2009, he announced that he was leaving Sun in order to create his own company. [8]

On 12 December 2009, Widenius asked MySQL customers to lobby the European Commission (EC), regarding Oracle's acquisition of Sun, citing concerns about potential Oracle control of MySQL; [9] this resulted in an online petition campaign called "Save MySQL". [10]

After leaving Sun, he formed Monty Program Ab and forked MySQL into MariaDB, named after his youngest daughter, Maria. [11] It includes several patches and plugins developed by the company itself or the community. One of these plugins is the Aria storage engine, which was renamed from Maria to avoid confusion with MariaDB. Monty Program Ab merged with SkySQL, who later renamed themselves MariaDB Corporation. He is also CTO of the MariaDB Foundation, the non-profit organisation charged with promoting, protecting and advancing the MariaDB codebase, community, and ecosystem. [12]

The Open Database Alliance, also known as ODBA, [13] was founded in 2009 by the Monty Program and Percona. According to its first announcement, "the Open Database Alliance will comprise a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL". [14] [15]

Personal life

Widenius lives in Kauniainen, Finland with his second wife Anna and his youngest daughter, Maria. Widenius has three children – My, Max, and Maria – who inspired the names for MySQL, [16] MaxDB and the MySQL-Max distribution, and MariaDB. [17] [18]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MySQL</span> SQL database engine software

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database organizes data into one or more data tables in which data may be related to each other; these relations help structure the data. SQL is a language that programmers use to create, modify and extract data from the relational database, as well as control user access to the database. In addition to relational databases and SQL, an RDBMS like MySQL works with an operating system to implement a relational database in a computer's storage system, manages users, allows for network access and facilitates testing database integrity and creation of backups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kauniainen</span> Town in Uusimaa, Finland

Kauniainen is a town in Finland, located in the southern interior of the country. Kauniainen is situated in the southern part of the Uusimaa region, and it is enclaved by the City of Espoo. The population of Kauniainen is approximately 10,000. It is the 95th most populous municipality in Finland. Kaunianen is part of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, which has approximately 1.58 million inhabitants.

MySQL AB was a Swedish software company founded in 1995. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, Sun was in turn acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010. MySQL AB is the creator of MySQL, a relational database management system, as well as related products such as MySQL Cluster. The company was dually headquartered in Uppsala, Sweden, and Cupertino, California, with offices in other countries.

MaxDB is an ANSI SQL-92 compliant relational database management system (RDBMS) from SAP AG, which was also delivered by MySQL AB from 2003 to 2007. MaxDB is targeted for large SAP environments e.g. mySAP Business Suite, and other applications that require enterprise-level database functionality.

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of relational database management systems. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. Unless otherwise specified in footnotes, comparisons are based on the stable versions without any add-ons, extensions or external programs.

InnoDB is a storage engine for the database management system MySQL and MariaDB. Since the release of MySQL 5.5.5 in 2010, it replaced MyISAM as MySQL's default table type. It provides the standard ACID-compliant transaction features, along with foreign key support. It is included as standard in most binaries distributed by MySQL AB, the exception being some OEM versions.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Axmark</span> Swedish computer expert & businessman (born 1962)

David Axmark, born 28 May 1962 in Sweden, is one of the founders of MySQL AB and a developer of the free database server, MySQL. He has been involved with MySQL development from its beginning along with the fellow co-founder Michael Widenius. He studied at Uppsala University between 1980 and 1984

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Drizzle (database server)</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon Phipps (programmer)</span> Computer scientist and web and open source advocate

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">MariaDB</span> Database management system

MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the original developers of MySQL, who forked it due to concerns over its acquisition by Oracle Corporation in 2009, but in 2024 MariaDB was itself bought by the K1 private equity group, which appointed a new CEO.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kaj Arnö</span> Finnish businessman

Kaj Sigurd Ademar Arnö is a Finland-Swedish IT-entrepreneur and columnist. He is since 2016 (also) a German citizen and has lived in Germany since 2006. He is the former Vice President of the MySQL Community at MySQL AB, Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation, founder of MariaDB Corporation Ab and the current CEO of the MariaDB Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MongoDB Inc.</span> American software company, developer of MongoDB

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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to MySQL:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DBeaver</span> Multi-platform database administration software

DBeaver is a SQL client software application and a database administration tool. For relational databases it uses the JDBC application programming interface (API) to interact with databases via a JDBC driver. For other databases (NoSQL) it uses proprietary database drivers. It provides an editor that supports code completion and syntax highlighting. It provides a plug-in architecture that allows users to modify much of the application's behavior to provide database-specific functionality or features that are database-independent. It is written in Java and based on the Eclipse platform.

References

  1. ↑ "Management Team". The company. MySQL AB. Archived from the original on 23 February 2008. Retrieved 10 January 2008.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  2. ↑ "Supercellin tiimi on vuoden ohjelmistoyrittäjä" (in Finnish). Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association. Archived from the original on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 24 April 2017.
  3. ↑ "Sun to Acquire MySQL". News & events. MySQL AB. Archived from the original on 5 September 2008. Retrieved 5 September 2008.
  4. ↑ Arnö, Kaj (April 2007). "Monty: The First MySQL Fellow". Kaj Arnö . Retrieved 23 October 2012.
  5. ↑ "Suomen 100 suurituloisinta 2008". Ilta-Sanomat (in Finnish). FI. 2 November 2009. Archived from the original on 3 November 2009. Retrieved 6 November 2009.
  6. ↑ "Verotiedot 2008". Helsingin Sanomat (in Finnish). Helsinki, FI. Retrieved 6 November 2009.
  7. ↑ O'Hear, Steve (10 November 2015). "Open Ocean Closes New €100M Fund, Recruits Richard Muirhead As London General Partner". techcrunch.com. Retrieved 19 September 2024.
  8. ↑ "Time to move on". Monty's blog. 5 February 2009. Retrieved 5 February 2009.
  9. ↑ "Help saving MySQL". Monty's blog. 12 December 2009. Retrieved 12 December 2009.
  10. ↑ Michael, Widenius (12 December 2009). "Help saving MySQL". Monty Says. Google. Retrieved 16 September 2012.
  11. ↑ "Why is the project called MariaDB?". AskMonty (knowledgebase). Archived from the original on 4 June 2013. Retrieved 7 February 2013.
  12. ↑ "Leadership". mariadb.com. Archived from the original on 8 October 2014. Retrieved 8 December 2014.
  13. ↑ ODBA (official World Wide Web site), Open database alliance.
  14. ↑ "Welcome". Open Database Alliance. Archived from the original on 20 September 2012. Retrieved 18 October 2012.
  15. ↑ "About the MariaDB Foundation". mariadb.org. Retrieved 8 December 2014.
  16. ↑ "History of MySQL". MySQL (Reference Manual) (5.1 ed.). MySQL. Retrieved 26 August 2011.
  17. ↑ "Aria FAQ: Why is the engine called Aria?". MariaDB Knowledge Base (knowledgebase). Retrieved 1 July 2020.
  18. ↑ Michael Widenius (28 October 2013). The MySQL MariaDB Story (Conference presentation). HighLoad++. The MySQL-MariaDB story (slide deck).
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