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On campus, open source is opening opportunities. Consider Mark Zuckerberg, former Harvard University undergrad.
As a Harvard sophomore in 2004, Zuckerberg used the open source MySQL database as a platform to build a small community Web site on which Harvard students could post profiles and photos, share their interests, and build relationships.
The Web site that Zuckerberg built on MySQL is now called Facebook. As its CEO, Zuckerberg is worth what Forbes estimates at $1.5 billion. With 90 million active users and publication in 15 languages, Facebook is one of the world’s most-trafficked Web sites, according to Internet tracker comScore.
One thing hasn’t changed throughout Facebook’s meteoric growth — MySQL continues to power the site’s data infrastructure, with deployments on roughly 1800 servers and performance to spare.
“We asked Mark Zuckerberg why he used MySQL and it was basically an open source tool that he learned at the university,” said Zack Urlocker, Sun MySQL VP of products. “He started building Facebook on MySQL because it was the right tool for the job.
“Going from a university dorm room to a company that has more than 1800 servers running MySQL is something that we think is pretty exciting,” Urlocker said. “It just goes to show you that a student with a good idea can go a long way.”
What Open Source MySQL Means for Education
As open source enthusiasts know, MySQL is the “M” in the popular LAMP and SAMP stacks, comprised of Linux or OpenSolaris, Apache, MySQL, and the Perl/Python/PHP scripting languages. Education has been a pioneer in the use of LAMP and SAMP, capitalizing on the cost savings and flexibility of these open source stacks. Now, Sun’s $1 billion acquisition of MySQL in early 2008 offers education new opportunities for database affordability, performance, and innovation, backed by 24x7 Sun support.
Budget-constrained universities are broadening open source deployments to contain costs. On the database side, the savings can be dramatic. For instance, three-year total cost of ownership for a typical MySQL deployment, including support, can be about one-tenth the cost of a comparable proprietary database installation.
And with MySQL Enterprise Unlimited, IT can deploy an unlimited number of MySQL Enterprise servers for the price of a single CPU (more than $40,000) of Oracle Enterprise Edition. The savings are even greater for education, as Sun offers education-only discounts of up to 40 percent on MySQL Enterprise Unlimited with Gold or Platinum support.
“Over the last five years, we’ve seen tremendous adoption of the open source stack in universities. It usually comes down to where a school wants to spend its budget, and open source is delivering more bang for the buck,” Urlocker said. “IT organizations in universities are facing a lot of budgetary pressures, and with MySQL they’re able to stretch their budgets further and work more cost-effectively.”
Low cost and high performance are helping to drive roughly 70,000 MySQL downloads daily, and are fueling expansion of MySQL footprints at such institutional MySQL users as Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, and Cal Tech, both as a classroom teaching tool and a datacenter technology.
MySQL as a Learning and Teaching Tool
Free to download, MySQL offers faculty and students alike a readily learned database platform for computer science laboratories. Extensive support for Ruby, Java, PHP, Perl, Python, and other languages let users innovate and experiment with the help of a dynamic open source Web community that offers message forums, how-to tips, documentation, and more.
“A lot of it’s driven by the fact that it’s easy to give students access to MySQL technology,” Urlocker said. “People just download the database, and students can develop the skills they need to enter the workforce. MySQL is pretty standard fare in computer science and software engineering curricula.”
MySQL as a Core Database Platform for Education IT
Like the IT industry at large, education IT environments are typically heterogeneous, with a mix of legacy and enterprise systems. Those can exact a high cost in maintenance and licensing. As a result, momentum is strong among primary, secondary, and higher education institutions to transition to open source databases, operating systems, and applications to support such core areas as tuition and loan processing, administrative computing, personnel and records management, and more.
MySQL is also popular for academic science and research. MIT’s Lincoln Labs, for instance, uses it to record satellite imaging data, Urlocker said. “It’s very, very high streams data — thousands of records per second recorded using MySQL — and it’s good, innovative scientific research that MySQL and Sun are helping enable,” he said.
Scheduled for release later this year, the new MySQL 5.1 will feature a range of enterprise enhancements that further broadens it appeal, Urlocker said, including:
- Table and Index Partitioning: Query response is accelerated by horizontally partitioning only relevant data sets through range, hash, key, list, and composite partitioning.
- Row-Based and Hybrid Replication: Data replication efficiency and flexibility is enhanced with new replication options, including a hybrid of row- and statement-based replication.
- Event Scheduler: This new tool allows developers and database administrators (DBAs) to automatically schedule execution of common SQL-based tasks.
- Upgrade Advisor in MySQL Enterprise Monitor: Available to MySQL Enterprise subscribers, the new Upgrade Advisor helps DBAs monitor and troubleshoot issues.
The Facebook site that one-time Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg launched isn’t the only social utility that relies on MySQL to power its operations. In August, Sun announced that LinkedIn, the professional network with more than 25 million members, selected MySQL Enterprise to support its rapid growth.
To Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, that major customer win helps to answer the MySQL question he’s asked most frequently by traditional customers … “but does MySQL scale?” Read Jonathan’s Blog on LinkedIn’s selection of MySQL and a phenomenon that will be familiar to any open source technologist in education IT — how the “invisible hand of open source” is driving cost-effective business performance.
With Sun’s commitment to education and enhancements to MySQL, the open opportunities for academia are broader than ever.
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