Solid is staffed by some of the original founders of Innobase Oy, a company that Oracle Corp bought last year. Innobase made storage software that was deemed critical to MySQL – hence its acquisition by the Californian database giant.
Solid is open sourcing part of its carrier-grade storage software later this month under the GPL. The company boasts 3 million production deployments of its software, which is starting to carve a nice niche for itself in environments where uptime is critical – for example, trading rooms, telecoms networks, medical devices and point of sale (POS) systems.
In many ways Solid is trying to rain on Oracle’s open source parade by filling a gap left by the acquisition. Rumor has it that Oracle tried – unsuccessfully – to buy MySQL AB, the maker of MySQL, shortly after it acquired Innobase last October to stifle out any potential open source competition for its core database business.
Some open source watchers have said that Solid’s technology is technologically better than Innobase’s InnoDB offering.
While Solid was founded in Finland, the company is now based in Cupertino, California and specializes in the development of embedded data management products.
