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Wednesday, May 7, 2008

A few thoughts on the Sun MySQL backtracking

OK, now that all parts of MySQL is going to be free, there are a couple of things which still stand out.

If you want to do a tiered service of free, Incident support contract, service contract, and variations there of, just don't do it immediately after an Open Source buy. This seems pretty obvious....in hindsight.

And when you backtrack, you need to generate the same level of notoriety/publicity that caused you to backtrack, so that people know you came to your senses. This is even more difficult in this Internet drive-by visit,10 sec attention span.

This was an Open Source buy, which means proprietary products selling tactics need to be done differently. If the selling had been along the lines of ; upto 4 CPUs no charge, anything higher, support will cost you, it would be a big deal with respect to OTHER Database vendors.

One, the vast majority of LAMP servers are on low end stuff and individuals tinkering with it, so no one will probably complain on the pricing front.

Second, you raise the bar for the other database vendors by cutting out their low end revenue segment (Oracle editions are free on single CPU machines and for personal use). Forced to compete with MySQL on multiprocessor boxes, you drive the database costs lower, cannibalizing prices in the process.

Three, if you benchmark it on your hardware and make it come out on top,(it's your product after all), you make a good TCO case with zero software acquisition cost for the customer but backed by your company support on YOUR hardware. You use the software to drive the hardware sales.

Heck, if Sun's multicore is as good as they claim, benchmarking on lower Mhz chips with more cores should show some results to crow about?

Let's see how this pans out.