Ulf Michael Widenius (often called Monty; born 3 March 1962, in

Helsinki Helsinki ( or ; ; sv, Helsingfors, ) is the Capital city, capital, primate city, primate, and List of cities and towns in Finland, most populous city of Finland. Located on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, it is the seat of the region of U ...

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bo ...

) is the main author of the original version of the

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

database, a founding member of the

MySQL AB MySQL AB was a Swedish software company founded in 1995. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, Sun was in turn acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010. MySQL AB is the creator of MySQL, a relational database management system, as well a ...

company and CTO of the

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the ...

Corporation AB. Additionally, he is a founder and general partner at

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

firm OpenOcean.

Biography

Early years

Widenius went to the co-educational school Broban, which was first merged into Minervaskolan and later to Lönnbeckska gymnasiet. After dropping out of

Helsinki University of Technology Helsinki University of Technology (TKK; fi, Teknillinen korkeakoulu; sv, Tekniska högskolan) was a technical university in Finland. It was located in Otaniemi, Espoo in the metropolitan area of Greater Helsinki. The university was founded in ...

, Widenius started working for Tapio Laakso Oy in 1981. In 1985 he founded TCX DataKonsult AB (a Swedish data warehousing company) with

Allan Larsson Yngve Allan Gillis Larsson (born 3 April 1938) is a former Swedish Social Democratic politician. From 1990 to 1991 he served as Minister for Finance. From 1991 to 1995, he was a Member of the Swedish parliament Riksdag. From Sweden's entry into ...

. In 1995 he began writing the first version of the MySQL database with David Axmark, released in 1996. He is the co-author of the ''MySQL Reference Manual'', published by O'Reilly in June 2002; and in 2003 he was awarded the Finnish Software Entrepreneur of the Year prize. Until MySQL AB's sale to

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

in 2008, he was the chief technical officer of MySQL AB. After the acquisition, he remained one of the primary forces behind the ongoing development of MySQL.

MySQL acquired by Sun

Widenius sold MySQL to Sun in January 2008, earning about €16.6 million in

capital gain Capital gain is an economic concept defined as the profit earned on the sale of an asset which has increased in value over the holding period. An asset may include tangible property, a car, a business, or intangible property such as shares ...

s in 2008 (€16.8 million total income), making him one of the top 10 highest earners in Finland that year.

After Sun

In 2008, Widenius established venture capital firm OpenOcean with MySQL co-founder Patrik Backman and early advisors Tom Henriksson and Ralf Wahlsten. On 5 February 2009, he announced that he was leaving Sun in order to create his own company. On 12 December 2009, Widenius asked MySQL customers to lobby the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...

(EC), regarding

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The wor ...

's acquisition of Sun, citing concerns about potential

control of MySQL; this resulted in an online petition campaign called "Save MySQL". After leaving Sun, he formed Monty Program AB and forked MySQL into

, named after his youngest daughter, Maria. It includes several patches and plugins developed by the company itself or the community. One of these plugins is the Aria storage engine, which was renamed from Maria to avoid confusion with

. Monty Program AB merged with SkySQL, who later renamed themselves MariaDB Corporation. He is also CTO of the MariaDB Foundation, the non-profit organisation charged with promoting, protecting and advancing the MariaDB codebase, community, and ecosystem. The Open Database Alliance, also known as ODBA, was founded in 2009 by the Monty Program and Percona. According to its first announcement, "the Open Database Alliance will comprise a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL".

Personal life

Widenius lives in

Kauniainen Kauniainen (; sv, Grankulla) is a small town and a municipality of inhabitants () in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Finland. It is surrounded and enclaved by the City of Espoo, in the Capital Region of Greater Helsinki. Kauniainen was founded ...

, Finland with his second wife Anna and his youngest daughter, Maria. Widenius has three children – My, Max, and Maria – who inspired the names for

, MaxDB and the MySQL-Max distribution, and

References

External links

*
askmonty.org

iTWire interview
{{DEFAULTSORT:Widenius, Michael Swedish-speaking Finns Free software programmers 1962 births Living people Businesspeople from Helsinki Finnish computer programmers Technology company founders Aalto University alumni