Open Source Database Offered

SAN MATEO (06/28/2000) - Progress Software Corp. on Wednesday said it was starting a new company called NuSphere to offer services and support for the MySQL database.

NuSphere will release MySQL under a general public license, thus customers can license the product from the company as a free, open source offering. Customers must pay for support.

NuSphere is a separate entity of the Bedford, Massachusetts-based Progress that will create NuSphere MySQL, a distribution of MySQL, as well as related tools.

NuSphere also is based in Bedford.

"The business dynamics were so different, and the products were so different, that we thought [starting the new company] was the right thing to do," said Britt Johnston, NuSphere's vice president of development and marketing.

On the product front, for instance, the company sees MySQL as distinctly different from Oracle Corp.'s and Informix Inc.'s databases, DB2, and even Progress's own database.

While those databases are transaction-centric, MySQL is tuned to Web content, personalization, and click-stream data. MySQL, however, currently does not process transactions.

Patrick Lannigan, vice president of operations and business development at NuSphere, says that the company is working on enabling MySQL to process transactions, and that capability is in an alpha version of the software.

"NuSphere starts with MySQL, but will branch out to other products in the future," Lannigan said.

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