29 ms·
MariaDB to go public at $672M valuation
- glutamate 5y agoHave SPACs rebranded as Blank Check Companies?
- slapshot 5y agoThe other way around. "Blank check companies" have existed for many many years, but were a relatively rare instrument and did very bespoke deals. Most investors never heard of them. In recent years, a standardized deal emerged that became known as a SPAC (and all the recent flavors of the month). If you look in SEC regulations, you'll see references to "blank check companies" all over the place.
- systemvoltage 5y agoInteresting. Why are SPACs getting a bad rep? Is it because of the acquisitions of shady companies or is there an underlying issue with the process followed by SPACs?
- sdan 5y agoSPAC sponsors get essentially a free money trade when they merge with a company; usually this results in merging with sub-par companies with bad numbers (no revenue or even product usually) so investors can cash out massively without the company really needing to succeed at all Case in point: most SPACs have fallen anywhere from 50-70% (evtol/lidar/battery companies) over the past year due to the fact that most don't have either a working product or poor numbers
- fullstop 5y agoThe creator of MySQL named it after his daughter, "My". After it was forked, the fork was named after his other daughter, "Maria". He has three children, so we've got one more go at this with a MaxDB if needed. edit: I was wrong -- He already used MaxDB previously. We're out of names.
- ab_testing 5y agoHe just needs to have another kid.
- c0brac0bra 5y agoI'm pulling for "RickyDB"
- CoastalCoder 5y agoSorry, I know that explaining a joke makes it less funny, but would you mind? I'm really curious now.
- golergka 5y agoWhat's wrong with BobbyTables?
- bpodgursky 5y agoI know SPACs get a lot of hate but I love seeing Wall Street listing firms get cut out of the IPO, losing their enormous "traditional" slice of the IPO pop. Good luck to MariaDB.
- boulos 5y agoYou're thinking of "direct listings" (and even then, Morgan Stanley has done several of them). SPACs are actually fairly inefficient and usually give large windfalls to the SPAC sponsors.
- bpodgursky 5y agoI'm far more OK giving a windfall to the SPAC sponsor who sought out and helped a promising company to merge with and list, than a WS gatekeeper who is paid simply for being in-between a startup and an IPO.
- mikeyouse 5y agoYeah, let's stick it to the Wall Street gatekeepers by paying fees to this SPAC. > The Angel Pond SPAC vehicle was founded by CEO and Chairman Theodore Wang, the founder of Puissance Capital Management and Angel Pond Capital and a former Partner at Goldman Sachs, and Simon Xie, the founder and Executive Director of Hangzhou Hupan Shannan Capital Management and a co-founder of Alibaba Group. If you want public money (via SPAC or IPO), you're paying money to "Wall Street" in one form or another.
- _sword 5y agoUltimately Wall Street gets paid more for SPACs than IPOs. Both sponsors and their advisors get more fees and upside. There’s a reason so many SPAC’s happened during 2020 and 2021 and it wasn’t because companies thought SPAC’s were superior to IPO’s. Banks made more money.
- NelsonMinar 5y agoAs a class, SPACs have higher fees than IPOs and perform worse as investments. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/12/04/have-spacs-been-cleaned-up https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/12/04/h...
- capableweb 5y ago> MariaDB, Fast Growing, Popular Open Source Database Software Company No matter how I turn and adjust the parameters, MariaDB seems to be the least popular of the big databases on the market today (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=MariaDB,mysql,PostgreSQL,mongodb,SQL%20Server https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...) and looking long-term (2004-preset), it seems like it's popularity is going down, not up (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=MariaDB https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=MariaDB). I wonder what metrics they are looking at to figure out that it's "Fast Growing", under "Viral adoption" and "A leading relational database brand"? Probably they have some insight that I don't, or this is just a press release filled with the usual marketing lies.
- yrgulation 5y agoI am an almost daily user of mariadb. However, when i google anything mariadb query wise i instead type mysql. As the two dialects are nearly identical but there is more documentation available for the mysql search keyword on google.
- tomxor 5y agoSame here. Only time I search for mariadb is when it's mariadb specific configuration.
- johncena33 5y agoYou should use bing or duckduckgo. I've been hearing lately on HN that they are many orders better than Google.
- bool3max 5y agoI have found the opposite to be the case.
- grepfru_it 5y agodefinitely not duckduckgo. bing has been on par, with technical searches but lacking otherwise
- scandox 5y agoIt might just be me but recently I have found myself a bit uncertain or nervous about the true compatibility of MySQL and MariaDB. I also find I sometimes don't know which I'm connecting to between all the different systems I'm running...which I used to be quite relaxed about, but now makes me a tad jittery.
- evanelias 5y agoThey're not drop-in replacements for each other, haven't been for years. Each has some unique features that the other lacks.
- eatonphil 5y agoThe Alpine Wiki has an informal blurb about it. The wiki doesn't seem to think there's a huge difference. https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Mysql#MariaDB_vs_MySQL https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Mysql#MariaDB_vs_MySQL
- evanelias 5y agoThe Alpine Wiki isn't written by MySQL/MariaDB experts, and is focused on an installation / very basic administrative perspective; from that angle they're not too different. But they've substantially diverged in terms of internals, advanced administrative functionality, and overall focus. source: I've been working in this space for 19 years, at scales ranging from tiny startups, to largest known mysql installation in the world.
- eatonphil 5y agoYeah true. Any good comparisons you can point us at?
- evanelias 5y agoThis is from a very reliable source but is 4 years old (pre-MySQL 8): https://www.percona.com/blog/2017/11/02/mysql-vs-mariadb-reality-check/ https://www.percona.com/blog/2017/11/02/mysql-vs-mariadb-rea... Separately you can search for "What's new in MySQL 8" type posts, nearly everything there is unique to MySQL. Some of the 5.7 stuff too, like native json column type. Ditto for recent MariaDB releases, btw! To be fair they have some cool stuff that MySQL lacks, such as system versioned tables, Oracle DB compatibility layer, native column types for uuid and inet6 (IPv6 addresses), etc.
- mikece 5y agoA public company will have a board of directors who set the direction of the company; as such what is to stop the board from directing that the license be changed?
- ComradePhil 5y agoI am sure they'll change their license, like some others have done: https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-platform/ https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-plat... https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business-in-cloud-era-v2/ https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-busines... I don't think there is any place for GPL in databases and similar software, specially if it is to be built and run by for-profit companies.
- mikece 5y agoI used to be opposed to GPL at moral level have have since changed my mind on this. It makes sense for anything that is essentially infrastructure -- operating systems, web servers, software firewalls -- to be GPL: improvements at this level are rarely something which gives a specific company a competitive advantage. In the cases where it would, however, I like the idea of dual-licensing so that a GPL project (for example: Linux) could be combined with proprietary code without needing to publish the changes. Right now anyone thinking along those lines (Sony, Netflix, Juniper, etc) chooses FreeBSD. In the case of the companies who have chosen FreeBSD for proprietary use they have, in many cases, ended up contributing work back to the parent project if for no other reason than self-interest in making updates to the base OS easier as their custom code remains slim. If Linux had been offering this dual-license option I think the examples above would have chosen Linux and there would have been contributions back to the parent project that aren't there today.
- webmobdev 5y agoYeah, but everything should be AGPL now instead of GPL. The software-as-service fiasco that changes the nature of "distribution" to bypass the open source requirements of licenses like GPL highlighted a loophole that corporates haven't hesitated in exploiting. AGPL has temporarily addressed this. However AGPL needs to go one more step and allow changing the license to plug any future loopholes. Right now, many GPL software cannot be automatically upgraded to AGPL license because we have to get permission from all the contributors to change the license. AGPL needs a clause that allows easy upgradation of the license retrospectively to ensure that the core concept can be defended in future too.
- bruce343434 5y agohuh? What kind of return on investment can one expect from a database engine stock(??) Why would anyone buy it?
- chronogram 5y agoMariaDB sells MariaDB Enterprise and MariaDB as a service (SkySQL).
- sdan 5y agoSPAC sponsors and mariadb investors get to cashout massively, while the SPAC drops 70% in the next year. A tale as old as time.
- abirch 5y agoWith MariaDB you can centralize your block chain.
- MikeKusold 5y agoMongoDB IPO'd for ~$30/share. They peaked in November at $590, and are currently at $409. If you invested you would have made a nice chunk of change. MongoDB does have a hosting service though which could be driving a decent chunk of revenue.
- lillecarl 5y agoSince they are no longer using a FOSS license their cloud offering is unique, if you want Mongo because it's not cloud lock-in like DynamoDB and don't wanna run the system yourself? Pay Mongo
- rr808 5y agoIs MariaDB code base a fork of MySQL, seems a good business to sell something twice. I would have expected him to have a non-compete after selling it the first time. Anyone know how he pulled this off?
- tomtheelder 5y agoMariaDB is 12 years old. Any sort of non-compete probably expired.
- zibzab 5y agoYes, but this is Oracle we are talking about. For every developer they have 4 salesmen and 5 lawyers...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ashvardanian 5y agoSadly I have to note, that almost all modern DBMS companies don’t bring anything new to the table. They incredibly over-funded, but compete in S&M instead of R&D. A sizable chunk of those are essentially Postgres over RocksDB. Don’t want to name anyone here, but 2 minutes of Googling with the right keywords will bring up more examples
- lillecarl 5y agoI can only see Yugabyte which says they're using more postgres code than Cockroach publicly
- hodgesrm 5y agoAssuming you have sensible legal advice, non-competes related to company sale have a duration. 3 years is typical in California, which was presumably governing law for the MySQL purchase by Sun.
- formvoltron 5y agosounds like a short
- donohoe 5y agoWow, like that must be roughly 300 Wordl's in money.
- gw67 5y agoDo you think it will have a lower PS ration than Mongo db? Currently, mongodb is 7$ TTM Sales per Share
- cies 5y agoTake that SCO^H^H^H Oracle! Other news: Adoptium/Temurin is doing FLOSS Java distro under the Eclipse Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoptium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoptium
- kaba0 5y agoHow is Oracle’s OpenJDK not FLOSS?
- cies 5y agoMySQL is also FLOSS right? It's not about it being FLOSS or not, its about their stewardship of open innovation projects. No surprise that super commercial/ legal heavy company is not great at it. Not saying I love Goolge, Facebook or even MS these days, but they seem to play it A LOT nicer that Oracle in that regard.
- kaba0 5y agoDoubt. Oracle was the company that did finally open-source java completely, making every single previously paid-only feature found in OracleJDK available for free/libre in OpenJDK, of which they are responsible for 99% of all commits. Also, the language has been doing exceedingly well under their stewardship.
- cies 5y agoI know. Still stories like this would not come out of ASF or EclipseF. https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/16/oracle_jdk_free_license/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/16/oracle_jdk_free_licen... It's messy.
- kaba0 5y agoBecause it is free ‘paid support’ for OracleJDK? Is red hat linux also scammy for having fedora and a paid distro as well? OpenJDK of which OracleJDK is just a fork is absolutely free and libre.
- zibzab 5y agoLarry Ellison is not happy today. Edit: let me explain. Larry bought mysql to save oracle from being outcompeted by a young entrepreneur. Who left after 2 years to create an even more competent DB. To add insult to the injury, this market value is below what they paid for mysql 15 years ago, which makes Larry look incompetent.
- ashvardanian 5y agoThat is hilarious. For reference, Sun acquired MySQL AB in February 2008 for $1 billion.
- kerblang 5y agoAnd Oracle bought Sun in 2010; Widenius got mad and created MariaDB the same day, apparently out of spite. (I don't think any of the characters were particularly ethical, smart or otherwise commendable... they just did what people do)
- 0des 5y agolook incompetent?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- slim 5y agoto be fair, market value should have been obviously much higher when mariadb was not around. I would say his error was tactical : oracle is probably not capable of growing an opensource product which makes that acquisition a bad move
- imjk 5y agoThis is a bad take. Oracle today is worth $216B. Over the last 15 years Oracle, under the leadership of Ellison, has grown 5x in value, returning significant shareholder value. I personally very much dislike Oracle and its products, but I have to respect Larry Ellison for his performance as an executive.
- 5y ago
- JediPig 5y agotalking about selling the same product.. TWICE.
- mizzao 5y agoWow, this seems like a tiny public company, reminding me of 1990s IPOs...which is great. Much better than gargantuan privately held companies where all the gains are going to a small group of capital holders.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoWhat makes you think the stock market is any different? If anything, a private company has greater leeway to share the wealth because they don't have nagging institutional shareholders. How many public companies have robust profit-sharing programs? FAANG-level companies don't count because they're in their own category
- tarkin2 5y agoSo a distrust of Oracle made someone more than half a billion? Those Oracle lawyers actually did create economic value then. Who would have thunk it.
- galosh 5y agoThere is some deeply perverse insight in this comment and I love it. The principle seems to apply quite generally across much of modern tech. Where are the viable contenders for Google products built on a platform of.. counter-reputation? This concept needs a name
- Bjartr 5y agoSeems like plain old competition to me.
- speedcoder 5y ago"Bait fork-and-switch"?
- dabfiend19 5y agodistrust of Oracle is Mongo's main source of income. and it's a ~$25B company now.
- hodgesrm 5y agoYou could also say it's a big market and there is room for multiple winners. Not everything is a monopoly.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- uvdn7 5y agoMy impression is that MariaDB has good ARM support out of the box. I am not sure about ARM support status of other popular DBs.
- spmurrayzzz 5y agoMongo has done a significant amount of work to optimize for ARM. And from my own testing, that work has paid off both on bare metal as well as cloud (specifically, the AWS Graviton2 instance type).
- 9thbit 5y agoWe tried using it as a drop in for MySQL docker containers on new ARM Macs and it is very slow, nearly as slow as emulating an x86 MySQL container.
- michaelcampbell 5y agoDocker on Mac used to have horrible I/O inefficiencies, which would cripple a DB I'd reckon. Is that still the case?
- edgyquant 5y agoSeems to be for me, yes, running a simple yarn install takes 10-15 minutes inside docker while it takes 2-3 minutes tops just using the terminal
- evanelias 5y agoOfficial ARM builds of MySQL 8 are available. Works great on my m1 mac! For docker images you just have to get them from https://hub.docker.com/r/mysql/mysql-server https://hub.docker.com/r/mysql/mysql-server instead of https://hub.docker.com/_/mysql https://hub.docker.com/_/mysql
- IgorPartola 5y agoHow many database companies are out there that made it big? How many are based on FOSS? It seems like the lesson of “you can’t make money in a FOSS database (or file system)” keeps being learned and relearned the hard way.
- volsa_ 5y agoMongoDB would be one that comes to mind which is public traded (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MDB/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MDB/)
- avrionov 5y agoThe market will be challenging because the big cloud players offer their version, but recently there were a few successful database companies: - MongoDB - Snowflake - Databricks These 3 are probably the biggest, but there are few others which are promising: Cockroach Labs, Materialize, PlanetScale, Yugabyte.
- ashvardanian 5y agothey are doing OK, but much worse than the private Snowflake, in terms of multiples and growth rate. FOSS is too easy to replicate, so Mongo is most likely earning a lot less than AWS and other cloud vendors from their forks of Mongo.
- jerrybender 5y agoSnowflake is publicly traded
- ashvardanian 5y agoby private I meant closed-source
- skinnymuch 5y agoNo one mentioned CouchBase (ticker BASE) going public in July. It’s worth $1B right now.
- jacquesm 5y agoWell, at least they won't be selling it to Oracle.
- cletus 5y agoWhatever else you might think, you can't help but be impressed by someone selling MySQL to Sun for $1 billion, forking it and then taking it public effectively selling it again. Respect.
- acomjean 5y agoI thought Oracle bought it. I think I had to make an account to download something. And I think it was Oracle that bought the MySql user group (I attended a couple meetings) pizza. I was the interface between Oracle Sales and management at a start up a long time ago. It was weird. They offer technical help to use their API, (so its harder to switch away, I was told by my boss). We were on using on a trial basis. They seemed to want to charge based on CPU speed of the computer installed on. The startup ran out of money...
- e12e 5y agoSun bought mysql, oracle bought Sun. https://www.e-channelnews.com/sun-microsystems-to-acquire-mysql/ https://www.e-channelnews.com/sun-microsystems-to-acquire-my... https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-sun-042009.html https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-su... But it was close 2008 and 2009 I believe.
- aliswe 5y agoThere's always a bigger fish!
- supperburg 5y ago
- lkxijlewlf 5y agoAnd the cycle continues. Who is going to fork MariaDB now?
- aliswe 5y agoJudging by the pattern, the founder?
- bastardoperator 5y agoMr Widenius, we see you. Good show! Up Next, MyMariaDBSQLMax
- pmarreck 5y agoAny comparisons to postgres?
- ezekiel68 5y agoThis is awesome. And if we don't like what the public company does in 6 months, someone can fork the codebase, call it monikadb, rinse, and repeat in a few years!
- mandarax8 5y agoThere is something wrong about the website of the company that bought the shares: https://angelpond.com/ https://angelpond.com/
- zaphirplane 5y agoSeriously! Widenius has 3 children, low odds on not starting a 3rd DB company that takes market share from his other 2 DB
- bryanp2021 5y agoThis is what we got when working with Oracle Linux on Oracle cloud platform: ``` $ yum install mariadb-server Loaded plugins: langpacks, ulninfo Package mariadb-server is obsoleted by mysql-community-server, trying to install mysql-community-server-8.0.26-1.el7.x86_64 instead Resolving Dependencies ``` There is a work-around but the way they picked up the word is kinda shocking...