Doesn’t surprise me. Many small upstart/maverick people who sell to big companies end up feeling the same way. The corporate culture shock of the sale is too much for some.

http://tinyurl.com/8a7quf

Marten is a typical slick sales exec, who lost touch with the community that handed him the business model he and his fat cat partners turned into a windfall.

MySQL ushered in an era where application servers (Apache) could easily be connected to relational, sophisticated, free databases; it was a revolution. Innovative ORM systems broke the mold on old SQL’s stale expressions.

But we gained a devil’s bargain – easy to create Web Apps that could not grow without arcane replicationa and clustering. Now we have a plethora of new sharding techniques, and all sorts of grid solutions for getting away from the column / row paradigm. Or, on the other hand, we preserve the illusion of columns and rows, and create other, more robust storage methods that scale better under the hood.

MySQL will grow with the times, but it has reached a point where it will compete with DB4O, and other, newer, and in my opinion, more naturally robust data storage architectures.

And as I said, it is just a timing thing that the honchos are taking break as these limitations are giving way to new alternatives.