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One of the marketing guys mentioned to me today that he saw Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen on CNN this morning reporting on their Q3 financial results.  The company grew by 41% year over year with record quarterly revenue of $851 million and operating income of $255 million. (Yes, those are quarterly figures!)  Chizen attributed the success to the strength of the recently released Creative Suite 3 and Acrobat.

MySQL is used by over a hundred different software ISVs and hardware OEMs for everything from telecommunications equipment to CRM and ERP systems.  But I'm particularly proud of the fact that Adobe uses MySQL in the Creative Suite 3 bundle.  I may never be able to explain to my in-laws exactly what it is that MySQL does, but at least I can point to a product on the shelves that they've heard of.  We highlighted Adobe's innovation as one of the Applications of the Year at our user conference in April.

Despite their large size, Adobe continues to be an innovative company, both in their products and in their development.  Not only do they leverage open source technology, they also contribute to it, open sourcing Flex, their web development framework earlier this year.

If there are other case studies you'd like to hear about MySQL, let me know.

• Adobe: Earnings call, Creative Suite 3, Flex FAQ, Open Source
• MySQL: Content & Workflow & Management, Adobe Case Study (PDF)

We had our first ever MySQL User Conference in Japan this week, put on by our very own Larry Stefonic (Larry-san as we call him) and our all-star Japanese sales & marketing team.  We had several hundred people at this multi-day event and it was standing room only.  There were keynotes by Marten Mickos as well as Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) the author of Ruby, the director of HP Japan and the General Manager of Sumisho, one of our top partners.  Many MySQLers were there from around the world to lend a hand including Jimmy Guerrero from Product Management, Carsten Pedersen from Certification, Stewart Smith, Brian and Monty from Engineering, and Kaj and Colin from the community team among others.   

We also launched our MySQL Enterprise fall update with some enhancements to MySQL Enterprise Monitor.  (Thanks to community dude Colin Charles for the photos. I have posted them on Picasaweb to create the embedded slide show above. You can also find more on Flickr.)

Note that there are also some upcoming one day conferences in London, Munich and Paris October 16, 18 and 23. 

I didn't realize InfoWorld was doing open source awards, until I read about it in Dave's blog.  But here they are.  And looks like MySQL won as best database.  Check out the "BOSSIE" awards.

• InfoWorld: Blog, Article, Best of Open Source, Database

There are two recent updates on the MySQL storage engine front worth looking into.  Paul McCullagh over at PrimeBase has updated their BLOB Streaming engine MyBS. (Ok, some people like the name, others don't.  I suggest going for something more serious sounding.)  The engine itself is pretty cool.  It'a not really a general purpose engine, but the idea is to be able to store BLOBS of any size and stream them directly into and out of the database.  Ideally, any engine could use the BLOB repository and streaming API. Paul got a good reaction at his MySQL Camp presentation in New York a few weeks back and is eager to get feedback.  One concern: will the limitation of 4 Zettabytes be enough? ;-) 

Jim Starkey and his team have also put out a new updated Alpha release of the Falcon engine.  This is still early stage, but worth trying out if you plan on deploying modern multi-core hardware with lots of memory.  For those who don't know, Jim is one of the pioneers in database technology and he invented BLOBs and MVCC some years back.  There are some pretty cool innovations in Falcon for minimizing lock contention which should provide very scalable performance for web applications in particular.  Falcon will be part of the MySQL 6.0 release available in 2008.  There's a series of technical articles Robin Schumacher has written on "Understanding Falcon" Part 1, 2, 3.

Cool to see so much innovation happening in and around MySQL. 

• BlobStreaming.org: Documentation, Download, Presentation, Blog
• MySQL: Falcon, Documentation, Download, Understanding Falcon part 1, 2, 3, White paper

One of the cool capabilities that's part of our Enterprise subscription offering is MysQL Enterprise Monitor.  This week at our user conference in Japan we showed a preview of the forthcoming Japanese version.  I don't know what it says, but it looks impressive.  ;-)

• MySQL: MySQL Enterprise, MySQL Enterprise Monitor, 30 Day Trial

Late last week we did a minor change to the layout of the MySQL home page and navigation.  While there are still a few minor issues to be corrected, overall the response has been favorable.  The key thing we wanted to do was reduce some of the clutter on the home page and provide a more streamlined and professional look.  The web team did a great job launching English, French, German, Italian and Japanese versions simultaneous.   You'll also see some other nice graphic design elements throughout the site, such as on the new jobs section at www.mysql.com/jobs and elsewhere. (And yes, we're hiring -- lots of open positions in Engineering and elsewhere.) 

But like any web site, it's a work in progress and there will be more improvements in coming weeks, months and years. 

Let us know what you like or don't like about the new look and any suggestions for further improvements.

• MySQL: Home, French, German, Italian, Japanese