MySQL Prepares To Go Public

prostoalex writes "MySQL CEO Marten Mickos told Computer Business Review the company plans to go public: 'Now entering its twelfth year, the company has built up just less than 10,000 paying customers, and an installed base estimated to be close to 10 million... When it does go public, MySQL will be one of only a handful of open source vendors to do so. Red Hat, VA Linux (now VA Software), and Caldera (now SCO Group) led the way in 1999 and 2000...'"

Comments

10,000 customers?

[mcrbids]

I'm not sure how to take this.

1) They managed to acquire 10,000 customers? Who are these customers, and why would they pay MySQL for a product that's not only free, but has better competitors available for free?

2) 10,000 customers, with 10 MILLION installs? So the odds are 1 in 1,000 that a user of your product would actually pay you anything? Those are TERRIBLE numbers....

Ahgh. Conflict. Partly because I just don't like MySQL - I'm a Postgres user and shrug my shoulders as to why anybody would use something with all the warts of MySQL...

Re:10,000 customers?

[drix]

Well, instead of trolling for Postgres, let's mosey on over to the MySQL website and see if we can figure out why someone might want to pay, hrm? Ahh yes, here we go, MySQL Enterprise. Mmm. Let's click that. Iiiinteresting. Says here you get 24x7 web and phone support plus 30 minute emergency response time. Eat that, pgsql-bugs. You also get consultative support from people who spend all day tuning MySQL installations for max performance and reliability. I can't even find the Postgres analogue of that to make fun of. Lots of other goodies too numerous to mention that might be worth paying for.

If you're tossing Wankr 2.1 together in your bedroom then MySQL free, pgsql, or even sqlite is more than enough to meet your needs. If you run a large business that relies on MySQL to actually make some $$, then purchasing support is a rational choice. Especially since TCO is still about an order of magnitude less than competition.

Re:10,000 customers?

[nagashi]

1) An admin utility (no, phpmyadmin doesn't count for crap) that doesn't suck. Please, just take pgadmin and make it connect to mysql. PLEASE. MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser work very poorly.

2) fix Unicode. UTF8?

3) How about stored procedures/functions with the same name, but different # of parameters? Works great in postgres.

4) Character truncation when inserting into char fields. (maybe this is fixed now? Last version I used was 5, just before it went GA)

5) Real standard TIMESTAMP data types.

6) Get rid of myisam and make InnoDB the standard. MyISAM is a joke.

Of these, 1-2 are very serious issues which will prevent me from working with it. 3-4 make my life more difficult, but I can get around them. 5-6 just make it much more of a serious database. Something where if people ask me what database I recommend for a project, I can honestly say 'MySQL!' and not have every other developer in the room give me odds looks (currently I usually say Postgres).

Re:10,000 customers?

[mcrbids]

Don't you feel the burning irony of posting this on Slashdot, one of the more prominent MySQL users?


Not at all. You *can* build great things with marginal technologies. It's just harder to do so.

Slashdot doesn't face a number of problems that MySQL would fail them on. Slashdot has a rather simple database schema - complex queries and joins are few to none. They don't rely on 100% ACID compliance. They don't use the database to help enforce data integrity.

So MySQL is sufficient for their needs.

But PostgreSQL matches in *all* these areas, and still manages to offer solid performance on complex queries/joins. It offers robust and mature ACID compliance. It offers excellent integrity constraints for your data.

It's not whether or not you can get something to work with MySQL - just like you can build a house with a dollar-store hammer. But why use the dollar-store hammer if both it and the $20 hammer are available to you for free?

Furthermore, the license behind PostgreSQL is MORE FREE than the one behind MySQL. You can build a commercial, shipping product with PostgreSQL and not be beholden to per-sale fees, as you'd see with MySQL.

So, again I ask.... Why would anybody use something with all the warts of MySQL?

Re:10,000 customers?

[headLITE]

You can't completely turn of non-transactional storage engines, but you can configure a different default engine. If you configure InnoDB as default-storage-engine in my.cnf, then by default your tables will support transactions.

So in total, all you're complaining about is settings you can actually change easily, either in my.cnf or in the server command line. Maybe I'm missing your point, but what exactly is it?

After all, *some* setup has to be the default, and you can't just dismiss MySQL because its default is not identical to yours because there are likely millions of users with defaults different from yours.

Re:amen

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? What wild new innovations have come from those you listed?

Going public means that the companies primary goal becomes to please the stockholders rather than employees and customers. It's nice that the folks who started it up usually get rich, but it doesn't tend to do good things for anyone else.