It’d be hard to find a better coding partner than Google. Google is known around the world for having some the best and brightest software engineers alive. So when a company like that releases updates and new features for a community-driven open source project, it should be pretty big news.

Computerworld is running an interesting article that looks at Google’s recent contributions to the MySQL database project. After reading the article, I get the impression that MySQL is less-than-enthused about Google’s contribution… but I digress.

Regardless of what MySQL thinks about the contribution, I think it’s great to see Google do something like this. We use MySQL on a number of projects and new features can only make the software better. Thanks, Google, for helping the community out like this.

I’d love to see Google (and other companies) give back to the software community more often. It works out well for all parties - we get better software and the companies providing that software get some good rep points.

When was the last time Microsoft or Apple released something helpful for you?

Good job, Google!

- Matt