What is MySQL's vision for the future?

Response from Marten Mikos, CEO of MySQL:

We are realizing that the biggest database is already out there, it’s just not yet connected. So what if we could build a sort of Skype for database access so you could share your connections with each other and allow sharing in real time all over the world? And you get very precise and clear data. It’s too complex today, but different sites have different formats and different ways of presenting the data.

For example: Weather data. What if you could issue an SQL statement and access databases all over the world and all the weather stations had opened up their data in real time so you could join whatever you are seeing to the weather data across the globe? You could see El Nino and find out the weather for sailing. So how do I plan that and how do I take all this information into account? I can’t do it today without a lot of work. But if I could do it in a structured way, it could bring in a lot of new business and really contribute to 2.0.

As latency decreases, asynchronous approaches synchronous. So to do that you need a lot of other stuff, a sort of DNS server knowing all the SQL database in the world so you could connect to them and go there ask about weather or cars or sports information. And you need to make the data definitions understandable and accessible to other. Those of you have created databases know your data structure, but you haven’t made it available to others, so you’d need to explain your column names for it to work. But we do have the technology today. RSS, Atom, Jabber, HTML, HTTP, XML, SQL, SMS, etc.

We are open source so when we do it, we want to do it with the whole world community. If there’s an incentive, to get the access to the data of others, you would share yours, whether you’re an individual or a corporation. There would be a need to broker between the various databases, how you can access it, and how you can join it. And then you would need a technology piece that would make it happen. It doesn’t really exist today, but the components do exist, but we need to bring it together.