Early years Born in
Helsinki,
Finland, 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, Widenius started working for Tapio Laakso
Oy in 1981. In 1985 he founded TCX DataKonsult
AB (a Swedish data warehousing company) with
Allan Larsson. 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. Until MySQL AB's sale to
Sun Microsystems 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 gains 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 his MySQL AB colleague 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 (EC), regarding
Oracle's acquisition of Sun, citing concerns about potential Oracle 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
MariaDB, 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 MariaDB. Monty Program Ab merged with
SkySQL, who later renamed themselves
MariaDB Corporation. In 2012, he was a founding member of the
MariaDB Foundation, a 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". == Awards and recognition ==