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MySQL Quietly Drops Support For Debian Linux [UPDATED]
volts writes "MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16, when its 'MySQL Network' support plan was replaced by 'MySQL Enterprise.' MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions — Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported on Debian OS.' We were told that 'Generic Linux' in MySQL's list of supported platforms means 'generic versions of the implementations listed above'; not support for Linux in general." Update: 12/13 20:52 GMT by J : MySQL AB's Director of Architecture (and former Slash programmer) Brian Aker corrects an apparent miscommunication in a blog post: "we are just starting to roll out [Enterprise] binaries... We don't build binaries for Debian in part because the Debian community does a good job themselves... If you call MySQL and you have support we support you if you are running Debian (the same with Suse, RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu and others)... someone in Sales was left with the wrong information"
Is it really a problem? If you worried about support wouldn't you be using a distro that also offers support contracts?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Clearly we need to get some tough mother forkin programmers on this...
MySQL (the database) still works with Debian, but MySQL (the support company) no longer sells support for Debian.
Loudly drop support for MySQL. Here are two excellent alternatives:
PostgreSQL
Firebird
Still, Debian provides good MySQL packages. Use them instead. If you need support, I'm sure you could find someone to provide it for you.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
I guess that's fair - my company migrated to supporting only "generic Red Hat Database", aka PostgreSQL.
Seriously, except in cases where you have no choice about database availability, I can't see a single reason to use MySQL these days. All of their cool features are owned by their competitors, and they're starting to pull desperate financing tricks like whittling away tech support and partnering with SCO. Are people still using it for new deployments, and if so, why?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I can't say for sure whether it's the same level of support, but there's always Canonical for Ubuntu and Progeny for Debian support.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
They're more than happy to be a SCO/Canopy partner.
I know where I'll not be spending my IT budget next year.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
I suppose you could do that, but unless you're planning on offering Enterprise support for your offering on a wide variety of platforms, you're not really gaining anything. MySQL will presumably still run on Debian, at least for now, but without the ability to buy support for it on that platform, you're not going to get approval to put it on that platform in any sort of business-critical environment.
Now, if you wanted to start a new company that offered Enterprise support for MySQL on Debian, you might have something there. I don't know that you would make any money, but at least you'd be offering something that isn't currently offered.
MySQL only lets me spoon it.
But Postgre lets me fork it all night long.
I see that a definite split of "Premium Linux" vs. "Unsupported Linux" is coming soon to a vendor near you. That doesn't mean that Linux will die, it's just going to smell funny (possibly like pee).
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I see there's already a few comments that the code should be forked. The thing is, what is forking going to do for it? They are dropping support for Linux distros, but that's not saying it won't run on other distros, just that it's not supported. The only way a fork would do anything is if the forked version had it's own support as well.
While I don't currently have or need a support contract from MySQL, I wouldn't transition away from Debian within our machine room just for their sake. I can't say this is a mistake for them, as I don't know what sales numbers they see, but here's one potential customer that's gone as a result.
Why? Is there a problem with the code, or the license? You're free to start your own company and offer tech support and other services for MySQL, and there's always PostgreSQL. But if the MySQL coders are still doing good work, I see no reason to fork.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
The problem is support, not inoperability. The software still works, you just don't have anyone to call when it doesn't work the way you expected. Forking the project does not solve this problem. If a third party wanted to sell a customer support contract for it, they could do so without needing a fork. If MySQL started releasing later versions of the software without the source, then a fork would be needed to have a branch that could be supported by another company.
MySQL just said, 'We don't think that your business is profitable to us,' for whatever reason they might have. Well, I'm willing to bet that MySQL support for Debian in the enterprise setting is plenty profitable for some other people.
The only thing that really happened is that MySQL cleaved off a part of their business and gave it away for free to anyone who wants it. And I'll bet plenty of people do.
"Generic Linux"???
Isn't "Linux" "generic" almost by definition. The only differences between packages are choices and package manager and usually only a few homegrown eye candy pieces.
No really, I'm not trolling. I'm serious. I've used all sorts of different "distros", Redhat, SuSE, Debian, Slackware etc and I am able to quickly move between them because at the core of it, its all but the same. And I'm not a Linux expert by any stretch of the imagination, so if I can manage, why can't the big boys who do nothing but Linux?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
> I don't know that you would make any money, but at least you'd be offering something that isn't currently offered.
I doubt it. And more important than my opinion, MySQL doubts it and has the sales figures to show it. Companies don't normally kill off profitable products and services, not even evil/stupid corporations.
Democrat delenda est
Why is this such a sore spot for so many people? Just because MySql no longer supports the flavor of the month distro of Linux, you all throw up your hands crying 'I never liked you anyway'.
The vast majority of mysql users will never buy a support contract, and those few who do, will probably be RedHat or Suse. (When was the last time a Debian user admitted he needed help for anything?)
Instead of having to support dozens of distros, Mysql is supporting the main two. It may be Open Source, but it's still a business.
D
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...or switch to the excellent Postgres which is more open and a more complete SQL implementation than MySQL anyway.
Expect to see more things like this happening as the IT landscape undergoes it's coming changes.
Chances are that if you need the support they offer, then you are not just running some little fan site using MySQL to store what avatar's people choose. Most likely if you have support for the db, chances are you probably have some sort of support contract in place for the OS as well and the rest of your critical infrastructure. You are probably already playing by their rules using certain OS releases, etc...
That would be my guess at least.
SUSE and RedHat are also the only IBM supported distros. Is IBM going for MySQL, ala Oracle grabbing Innobase and Sleepycat?
-BA
Mmm fork MySQL? Why? There is nothing wrong with the code. You could try to fork the support and start a company specialized in MySQL support on Debian.....
:-) Anyone in? ;-)
I think there is a market for this. The only thing you need is a couple of good people. You/we(the community) could also create a company GPL style. Create a pool of people willing to devote there time on solving MySQL Debian support problems. Create a ticket like system and assign questions to people in the pool.
This way you can quickly create a non-profit company with little to non investments. The biggest "problem" is that you have to attract people willing to become part of you expert pool.
While writing this, it might even be a good challenge to start this..... I will think some more about this.
Regards,
Johan Louwers.
Regards, Johan Louwers.
MySQL (the support company) no longer sells support for Debian.
It seems to me that this decision must be driven by sales or market research indicated there is no market for support contracts on Debian based systems. So, does this challenge the notion that OSS can work in a capitalist world when the real "product" is support?
Debian based distros are a significant chunck of the Linux market|mindshare. This decision essentially means the combination of Debian + MySQL is doomed in the business setting.
On the other hand, this does seem to show that there IS a market for support on RH based distros.
In fact, as I think about it, I think what this is really saying is that they want to support MySQL, NOT the underlying OS. Perhaps they have some data that shows that many of their support calls are really for the OS or other parts of the system. In making this decision, they don't rope themselves into having to support anything but MySQL. They can answer a non-relevant (to them) call with "oh, that's an OS issue - call your OS support provider." I'd say that's fair.
It also helps them when there is a problem with MySQL on a client system...THEY can call RH (or whomever) support to make sure everybody gets things 'right.' No, the more I think about it, the more I think this actually strengthens the "give away the software, sell support" model.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
Wadya mean? Postgresql is pretty easy to compile from source and I've had zero problems installing it from RPMs, etc. As for it's documentation I have found it to be very useful. What do you mean by configure anyway? You got your conf files that normally live in /var/lib/pgsql and their annotations are pretty clear. So I think your just blowing smoke.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
There are a lot of calls here to fork the code. I'm a bit wary of calls to fork a project by people who lack the reading comprehension to understand the project. These may not be the best people to direct a project :)
Just to clarify the crappy summary, MySQL are not saying that their software won't run on Debian or Ubuntu or whatever... It will still run on most OSs and distros, but if you are using Linux, MySQL AB will only sell you a support contract for MySQL if you are running on Dead Rat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Novhell (SLES?).
Get it? Got it? Good!
I think the point is that they haven't made it clear, even on their website that they have made a business decision to ignore everything but Red Hat and Suse. From the story: "We learned of this when MySQL declined to sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported on Debian OS.'". So a company got bitten by using a generic (Debian) Linux then asking for support and finding out that "generic" means anything but.
They really should make some sort of statement, even if it's market spun, e.g. "...for the benefit of our enterprise customers we are concentrating on supporting the two most popular commercial distributions... we expect third-party support companies and the active MySQL community to continue supporting less popular and non-commercial distributions". (P.S. for the benefit of anyone flicking through, I made that up!)
Then again given the amount of helpful people around not wanting a dime for the help they provide, the only people giving a damn are those people paying for an enterprise version of Linux.
Community support is a great thing, and hopefully all of us that USE F/OSS software give back to that in some way. But the business world, and many individuals, operate on the principle of "you get what you pay for." Most of the time this is a good guideline, but F/OSS is an exception. There are QUALITY products out there, and quality support, available for no upfront financial cost. But in the minds of many business types, if you pay nothing, it must be worth nothing.
(car analogy to follow)
Think about it this way; would you take a FREE car without ANY suspicion that there's something wrong with it? Perhaps, if you knew the seller and trusted him. You and I trust the seller (the OSS community) to provide good products and services, but the average PHB does not know this community - he cannot trust his enterprise with such an unknown.
Another way to put it is that you and I can see the VALUE, independent of price, of OSS, but many others don't. They associate the value with the price tag. Without PAID support, the support is worthless.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
The "who do you sue" line's as old as the hills and, largely speaking, irrelevant because you're never
going to get to first base unless it's a screw-up of epic proportions. Even then, it's more likely to
be a colossal waste of your time and merely an exercise of fattening your lawyer's wallet.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
But if the MySQL coders are still doing good work
What do you mean by still? It makes you sound like you are trying to claim MySQL was not a fucking toy database for girlymen.
> This looks liike an opportunity for Postgres
Right on. And with the excellent performance of the newly-released PostgreSQL 8.2, it's a good time to make the switch.
The Army reading list
Deleted
For example, when I was a kid a local pizza delivery chain started delivering breakfast pizzas. They made money hand over fist. But after a few months, the calculated that the additional cost of maintaining a third shift of workers and an expanded breakfast menu would bring in more money if put into opening additiona stores serving the traditional lunch, dinner, late night crowd with the normal pizzaria menu.
Most likely what is happening is that the MySQL corporation finds that if it spends the same number of dollars training a support tech, those dollars bring in more money if the tech is dedicated to Redhat and/or SuSE than if the tech is also trained on Debian. This doesn't mean that there is no market for Debian support. It means only that MySQL has a higher relative profit from supporting just two databases. The calculation may be different for another company that has a different resource pool. For example a company that already supports Debian Linux, may have a very low marginal cost for adding MySQL on Debian support and, consequently, have a far higher ROI for supporting MySQL on Debian.
. . . without the ability to buy support from MySQL for it, that is. Third parties, system integrators, etc. will continue to support whatever their customers pay them for. So while this is a blow for Debian in big enterprise, let's face it, how many big enterprise environments were running straight Debian in the first place? Red Hat's king with SUSE buzzing around their ankles. This won't affect small to mid sized organizations with outside IT people.
I've been using Mysql for many years, through several companies, small and large. Never once has mysql support ever been requested / needed -- it's rock solid. What does support conist of anyway, help with sql syntax?
I doubt most Debian users will care.
The other explanation would be that Debian has done something to seriously piss the MySQL people off (my speculation).
I *know* that they went this way with the Seamonkey crew. Here is a reproduced Newsgroup response from a Seamonkey developer on the subject of Debian and Iceape (the previous thread entry is in italics and the developers response is bold:
The "SeaMonkey" trademark is held by MoFo, but AIUI, they allow the Council to grant people the right to use it.
Well, MoFo applied for the trademarks, but doesn't hold them yet, as they've not yet been granted. They applied for them representing us though, and they will leave management of the trademark in the hands of the SeaMonkey Council.
But AIUI, Debian has moved past caring about using MoFo's trademarks.
And AFAICT from this thread, the level of bitterness on the SeaMonkey side seems even higher than in the Mozilla community in general.
That may very much be true, as they pre-judged us of being the same as MoCo and not even listening to what we wanted to say. Us being legally backend by MoFo was enough for them to not even really discuss this topic, i.e. not even asking what the terms for using the SeaMonkey trademarks would be.
And their choice of name for the clone they are shipping is an insult in my ears anyways, but that's just my personal opinion.
BTW, I really think their inconsistent treatment of trademarks is enough reason for not understanding them anyways. Their own trademarks are protected with one of the strictest possible policies (no use except explicitely granted by Debian) and then they accuse other of being too strict - and it seems some of their responsible people have not yet understood that trademarks and copyright are two completely different things legally.
Anyways, for me, that discussion is over and Debian itself is dead meat in this regard for me personally (note that ubuntu even departs from Debian's path for MoCo trademarks already).
Elsewhere in the thread, IceApe was described by the same person as a 'Crappy Clone'.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
>Companies don't normally kill off profitable products and services, not even evil/stupid corporations.
I'd have to disagree with that. I've watched three large companies for whom I've worked -- all Fortune 500 companies -- kill off profitable products and services that were not as profitable as they wanted. The company I'm working for right now sold off three business units because they didn't have a profit margin above 30%. We're only keeping the parts of the company that can beat 30%: if you don't, you're out the door. There are probably a lot of fields where companies can't afford to throw away marginal profit, but there are plenty of fields where it's not worth chasing chump change when there's a 50% profit margin to be hunted down and seized.
If that's the case, it's quite possible another, smaller and more agile, company could live very comfortably on the profits from this discard.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I don't really blame them for focussing on enterprise level versions. It fits the "Do one thing, and do it well" philosophy. However, I also can't help feeling that they're shooting themselves in the foot.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Only in WoW...
Yes, I know, there goes my Karma.
Huzzah! Let me rephrase the question: "Besides the obvious Microsoft, who is the second or third premium Windows vendor"? There is no law or rule that says there must be three or even two premium Linux vendors used by the IT industry. In the end, Novell Linux will likely get more help from MS to be the number one leader. RedHat might die off or just become so irrelevant that it won't matter. Whatever the case, the last thing Microsoft really wants to see is a strong and unified Linux community. The way I see this playing out is that businesses begin to tepidly embrace Novell Linux which increases their market share. The developers who work on high profile projects (like Gnome, KDE, MySQL, etc...) are more and more driven by the business needs than the original "itch" that needed scratching. So there are some forks on major projects... However, the non-premium versions that come out of these forks have a lot of difficulty in attracting talented developers as they are mostly busy working on the premium versions that were part of the old guard Linux camp. There are good developers who would work on some of the forks, but not as many as there were previously. Therefore the forks are buggier, more prone to security holes, and in general don't work as well as the MS blessed versions from Novell.
This is part of Microsoft's campaign against what they term "hobbiests". I use Linux both at work and at home and although I find the term hobbiest insulting, that is what people would probably consider me. I find the uses that I apply Linux to at home to be quite serious. Calling a professional IT guy who uses Linux at home for day-to-day stuff a hobbiest is akin to calling an electrician or plumber who does work on his house an amateur. The fallout that I see is that potentially in another four or five years, I may find it very hard to use Linux at home unless I want to buy into the commercially blessed versions. And if I do buy into them, I'll have a second rate Linux that makes Windows look good. (You know that MS won't allow any MS blessed Linux to outperform or outdo Windows in certain key arenas) If I continue to try and use the non-premium Linux distros I'll probably find that support for new hardware and functionality is just as bad as it was in the early days because the developer mindshare will not be there. At least that's what I'd term a worst case scenario.
In reality it probably won't be THAT bad, but it will hurt. Even though the code is free/open for many of these projects, I've seen what a lack or very low count of talented developers can do to slow down or kill an otherwise decent project. We all have. It's likely that I'll be able to use non-premium Linux at home in the future, but not without even more headaches and hassles than I experience today. The premium versions will likely offer a better experience but always at the expense of being a step or two behind Windows (which is not the current situation). MS is likely doing this because they see that Linux has already surpassed Windows on many fronts. It's more clever maneuvering from MS. If only the FOSS world could think that way sometimes...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
My response is: Use what works. When MySQL fails to work for whatever situation I'm in, then I'll consider switching to something else. Probably PostgresSQL, but maybe not.
Firebird is out, regardless. Configuration is difficult, and I'll never forgive them for their pissing and moaning over branding. It's not just the project devs that have long memories.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
atleast it has decent support for transactions, key constraints, and procedural languages.
The only difference between Oracle, SQL Server, DB/2 and MySQL is one of extent, not of kind.
You obviously have never really worked with them then.
I was mid-level DBA of Oracle for nearly a couple years, programmer for both SQL Server (Microsoft and Sybase), and currently use DB2 (LUW) (DB2, not DB2, unless you are referring to OS2's DB2, which was called DB2/2), and they are worlds apart. The only way to consistently understand the difference between them is to understand the mindset, otherwise they are just "differences", and the user will most likely not know whow to take advantage of those differences.
Every time i use MySQL i have to hold my nose. Yes, it does the job, and it does it fast and easily, but for someone who cares about DBs, good design, and all that, MySQL falls very far from the tree.
Have you read my journal today?
Probablly a victim of an injection attack
; DROP SUPPORT debian
Boy that's for sure :(
:(
USB subsystem changes between SUSE 10.0 and 10.1 produced some spectacular driver failures. New elements inserted in the middle of USB data structs in a point upgrade of a "stable" kernel?!?!? What is stable about that?
The Linux development and distrribution process has a LOT to learn about system stability. Expecting EVERYONE to ALWAYS be 100% current and recompile EVERYTHING for EVERY distro and then NEVER updrade an installed kernel or libs again (you know to fix bugs or security holes?) without chancing having to rebuild the entire universe or suffer random breakages is completely and utterly wrong headed.
This may have been fine in the good old days of "install and forget". But these days with the need to be CONSTANTLY up on security patches, it's become quite a nightmare to maintain a linux box for any length of time without having to do a complete reinstall because of unresolvable incompatibility problems between the Kernel, libs and software. Doing it by hand is a major recipe for disaster, but even keeping up with a distro's precompiled sets of upgrades is a crap shoot and has resulted in serveral system failures.
Linux needs stability in a BAD way.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
First, by support the article refers to technical support contracts, not whether or not the software will actually run on Debian. And MySQL has decided that they will provide technical support only for a very limited subset of the popular Linux distros. As far is this issue is concerned, Debian is in the same boat as a lot of other distros and was not singled out for special treatment.
Second, the Mozilla trademark issue was at its core unavoidable. Debian has to be able to say to its derivative distros that everything in "main" is really free, Mozilla had copyrighted images that were NOT free, so Debian couldn't use them and Mozilla responded by saying they had to rename the browser. So they did, and the Mozilla-branded browser remains in "non-free" due to the copyrighted images. Everyone accusing Debian of hypocrisy on the trademark issue because they have an official logo is (to be blunt) wrong. Debian has an official logo (that they hardly ever use) to provide legal recourse to stop anyone else claiming to be Debian. It is otherwise of no use in the project and does nothing to prevent derivative distros from doing their own thing when they want to.
Incidentally, the Mozilla trademark dispute has caused me to reinvestigate my use of ALL software from Mozilla. I'm finding that KDE software is far more user-friendly and powerful than the Mozilla software across a number of applications. KMail can be made (rather easily) to store mail in ~/Mail in mbox format, its mail filters execute much faster, I can right-click -> "Create Filter" -> "Filter on From" in seconds, and in dozens of other ways it kicks mozilla-mail's ass. Likewise KNode, Konqueror, and Kontact.
Yes but it doesn't have what people REALLY want. Replication, clustering, failover, case insensitive where clauses.
If you want high availibility you have to cobble together slony and pgpool (which does not support multi master replication) neither of which is suitable for working over a WAN.
There is a reason why people choose MySql and that's because it delivers the features people really want first. Even the features are not 100% "correct" they are delivered "good enough" to get "real work" done.
Take case insesntive where clauses for example. For the last five years or so that I have been following the pg mailing lists there must have been hundreds of requests from people who want to switch over from mysql, ms-sql, oracle, informix, firebird etc for a case insensitive collation option. They just get ignored and told to change all their queries to use ILIKE or *~ or some other stupid non standard postgres only SQL. Oddly enough their primary excuse for not providing it is that it's not a SQL standard.
So if you using any kind of an ORM and you can not stomach asking your employees or web users to remember the exact capitalization of everything they have ever typed into your database then postgres is not an option.
Sorry.
evil is as evil does
There have been occasional issues; I'm actually a keeper of an internal list of bug fixes for corruption issues in MyISAM. It's getting really tough to find and reproduce them these days, as the bugs have largely been beaten back to seldom-used combinations of situations over the years. Still, we do occasionally get new reports (generally of obscure ways to corrupt an index) to track down. I don't recall anything resembling what was described. InnoDB checksums the data pages and hence works well as a dodgy RAM and hard drive detector and we see that regularly.
If it happened it was probably either a really ancient version or someone ignoring upgrade instructions. Or, worse, downgrade instructions.
Like you I've really hammered MySQL in production, with a billion or two queries a day and a few hundred gigabytes of data. Generally speaking, it simply works. Which is in part why Wikipedia and most of the other (Alexa) top ten sites on the net are MySQL users. Not at all bad for a database you have to pay exactly nothing to use.
Still, reality applies, MySQL is software, so MySQL will always have bugs, and sometimes someone will discover a cute new one.