So it seems that Sun has made it clear that the core product will remain open source. Of course the definition of what is core and what isn't is up to Sun/MySQL to decide, but it seems that overall more things will be released as open source than if MySQL would have gone through with its planned IPO. So this is a good thing. Speaking of non core products, I really like what Mike and his team are doing in the GUI department with the workbench and their other GUI tools. However since Sun is friendly to PostgreSQL and actually also distributes SQLite (its bundled with Solaris after all), I wonder if they are considering making their tools more and more portable across other RDBMS?

Hi Lukas,

you are correct with your assumptions about the GUI Tools. MySQL Workbench was built with a RDBMS independent architecture in mind and if you take a look at the defined objects you will already see classes for Oracle, MSSQL, Sybase, ... There are some other features which have higher priority than multi-database support, but that is definitely on our list of upcoming features in the future.

So from this perspective the Sun acquisition was a big win as we are going to see this earlier than originally planned :)
Mike