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

two out of 3 aint bad

[macadamia_harold]

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...

Well, as long as Darl McBride doesn't get his hands on the company they should be ok.

amen

[battery111]

I think it's awesome when open source companies go public. It allows them to get enough capital to truly innovate, and help prove to the unbelievers that open source IS a viable, successful way to make outstanding software. I hope more open source companies continue this trend.

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.

Re:amen

[egreshko]

Sorry to disagree with you...but...

      What makes stockholders happy?
      Rising stock prices.

      How do companies like Red Hat make their revenue?
      Maintenance subscriptions.

      If customers are unhappy they will stop subscribing to maintenance.
      If customers stop their subscriptions, Red Hat's revenue declines as do
      their stock price. This makes stock holders unhappy.

So, there is a linkage.

Is that 10,000 customers total over 12 years?

[QuantumG]

Or is that 10,000 customers that regularly renew their MySQL licenses?

What's the average license cost? $40,000?

Re:Is that 10,000 customers total over 12 years?

[Duncan3]

$595 - $4995/server/year. Most in the low end I'm sure.

$4995 is still a heck of a lot less then a full time DBA.

Re:Is that 10,000 customers total over 12 years?

[timmarhy]

most real dba's have a lot more then a single server to look after. try about 10 or more. a dba's a heck of a lot cheaper.

Re:Is that 10,000 customers total over 12 years?

[ScentCone]

$4995 is still a heck of a lot less then a full time DBA

Um... how does paying for the license get around needing a DBA? It's not exactly an either-or.

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?

[martenmickos]

Thanks for the questions!

The customer count is over several years. Yes, the majority of our users choose not to pay. The current ratio is something like 1 in 1,000. But as you probably know as an open source user, there is great benefit to a project also from the ones who don't pay.

Those who pay do it for the value-add they receive: production support, scheduled binaries with only bug fixes, the monitoring and advisory servce, etc. From a business perspective the great thing is that the ratio of paid to non-paid is changing and our business is steadily growing.

We are proud at MySQL to build something that has great value to the FOSS communities and is a great business at the same time.

Sorry to hear that you don't like MySQL, but great to see that you nevertheless take time to read /. postings about us and to post your own. Let us know what "warts" you see in our product and help us improve it. Then perhaps one day you will find that it serves your needs.

Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB

Re:10,000 customers?

[suv4x4]

I'm a Postgres user and shrug my shoulders as to why anybody would use something with all the warts of MySQL

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

While you're busy with your tiny holy war, people take MySQL for what it offers and builds useful services and sites with it, among those Google, Yahoo, Digg, Apple...

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?

[codepunk]

You mean warts like not having to run a vacuum on the frigging database every week so it does not grind to a halt. I love the functionality of postgres but I don't see it as being no where near as fast or as stable as mysql.

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?

[codepunk]

Marten, he wants you to add table vacuum so we have to spend our weekends like we do on postgres running it just to keep the database from grinding to a halt.

Nope, just keep doing what you do best...

Re:10,000 customers?

[slamb]

Sorry to hear that you don't like MySQL, but great to see that you nevertheless take time to read /. postings about us and to post your own. Let us know what "warts" you see in our product and help us improve it. Then perhaps one day you will find that it serves your needs.

I don't like that MySQL does not keep my data safely and securely out of the box. Some examples:

• I need to flip a whole set of knobs to make MySQL return failure on invalid data. Apparently TRADITIONAL, ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO, NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO, NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION, NO_UNSIGNED_SUBTRACTION, NO_ZERO_DATE, NO_ZERO_IN_DATE, ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY, and STRICT_ALL_TABLES. No other RDBMS even has these knobs, much less has the defaults wrong.
• There's no way (that I can find) to completely turn off non-transactional tables. As I understand it, if I forget to tell it when creating a table to make it transactional, it's silently not. If a transaction involves even a single non-transactional table, the whole thing is non-transactional. This makes me nervous.
• I don't know if it does an fdatasync() at the right times out of the box on all table types. I need ACID, not doubt.
• When users have no password set, anyone can connect without a password. Contrast to PostgreSQL: no one connects without authentication unless you explicitly say so in the configuration file. But it's unobtrusive because local users can authenticate via Unix domain sockets / SO_PASSCRED.

I can't take MySQL seriously until this changes. I understand that you have backward compatibility concerns, but that's life - you pay a price for the poor decisions you've made in the past. You might have to go through a long deprecation period before you can get rid of these knobs. At the very least, don't have them flipped this way unless I start mysqld with the --treat-my-data-as-garbage command-line option.

If you fix this fundamental problem, I'll be impressed. I may not use your product, but I will stop laughing at it.

Re:10,000 customers?

[dfetter]

No more ironic than that slashdot runs on the .org TLD, which in turn runs atop PostgreSQL.

Re:10,000 customers?

[grcumb]

In my own experience with free software, about 1 in 1000 downloads pay up. The large companies almost always pay. Small one man businesses sometimes pay. Europeans usually pay. Russians and Indians never pay...

In Soviet Russia, YOU pay the customers!

(Shit, I just made a Soviet Russia joke. Now I feel dirty....)

Re:10,000 customers?

[Anonymous Coward]

MyISAM is certainly not a joke. Sure, it has its limitations, but for its niche, it works quite well for what we use it for. Bulk load performance makes for a great staging area when you load 250+ million records per day (and that includes everything else we throw at MySQL to process the data). The ability to choose engines optimized for the task at hand is powerful and we make use of a number of them in our design including MyISAM and INNODB. I feel no need to defend MySQL; it works.

Re:10,000 customers?

[darekana]

Why would anybody use something with all the warts of MySQL?

Probably for out-of-the-box replication...

Re:10,000 customers?

[mcrbids]

If you're tossing Wankr 2.1 [parm.net] 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.

I make money with my PostgreSQL database. My small-but-growing business will pass the $1,000,000 gross income mark this year, with over 30% profit margins. My issue here is that PostgreSQL has "just worked" with zero significant support issues in almost 7 years.

24 x 7 x 365.

Over 70 school districts use our product, and while there are the inevitable wrinkles, uptime is *never* a problem, and never has a single support thread been tracked back to a fault in the database.

So, no. That's not an issue. At least, as far as I can determine.

My experience with "paid support" is that people who are essentially hired monkeys and who do not understand what they're talking about do google searches for you while you wait. If that fails, they talk to their managers who then do more google searches.

Typically, it's 4 or 5 days before you get ahold of somebody who does anything but google searches, and he/she then needs to spend a few hours determining that there is a real issue to be addressed. And when that happens, they'll implement one of the solutions found in a google search first.

But a support e-mail list usually has meaningful answers within a few hours if your question is reasonably well written, and doesn't cost jack.

Which do YOU prefer?

Re:10,000 customers?

[jadavis]

Says here you get 24x7 web and phone support plus 30 minute emergency response time.

Sun Microsystems offers 24x7 PostgreSQL support.

Eat that, pgsql-bugs

I've always found the mailing lists to be great. I'm sorry you didn't have that experience. By the way, pgsql-bugs is not a typical support channel, you'd be better off in pgsql-general or #postgresql if you have support needs. Unless you have an actual bug, of course.

Re:10,000 customers?

[killjoe]

"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."

Try sqlyog. It's free and it kicks the ass of pgadmin any day.

Re:10,000 customers?

[kv9]

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.

HeidiSQL. it's sexy.

Re:10,000 customers?

[TheRaven64]

yet in the real world it seems to be working just fine.

And let's pick a not-so-random name from that list; Wikipedia. Remember when they had some major hardware issues, which caused their database servers to crash. The admins announced proudly that almost half of their database servers had come back online without data corruption! They actually believed the fact that half of their MySQL installs had trashed their data due to not supporting ACID properly was a good thing just because not all of their machines had been in the middle of a sensitive operation at the time.

This is why people laugh at MySQL users. They honestly seem to believe that a product which doesn't even fulfil the basic requirements for a database is adequate for their needs. Try an experiment; get a real database and a MySQL server running, and keep firing transactions at them. Then pull the power cord out of the machine. Do this a few times. See which database has any data left at the end. A real database will lose the last transaction (there's no way it can't, unless you have redundant everything including power), but it won't lose the rest of the data.

Re:Oracle aquisition

[timmarhy]

won't matter if they do, someone will fork the GPL version. ah the beauty of gpl. companys can totally fuck up a product and we will still get to use it as we please.

Not all public companies are worth billions

[Duncan3]

Wow, lots of rage filled comments so far.

Not all public companies are worth as much as GE or WalMart. Vast numbers of public companies exist, and many are only worth a few million. 10k customers paying for support (we all know they need it) is still millions in revenue a year, more then enough to go public without being bogus.

Public != Billions.

Re:Cost

[KrisWithAK]

If it was just announced, I don't think a price has been set yet.

An IPO is an initial offer of stock for sale to the relatively general public -- primary market. Usually an equity syndicate team at one or more investment banks determine the best combination of price and quantity of shares to offer to maximize the capital raised for the company, while still making the value attractive to investors. Besides taking a cut of the capital raised, the banks might also buy some of the shares themselves before/after passing on the IPO offer to usually their most "valued" and "qualified" clients. If I remember correctly, the IPO for RedHat was $14 . If you don't get the "IPO", then you have to buy it once it opens on the open market -- the secondary market. If the stock is hot and has lots of hype, then it usually opens in the market much, much higher. It also technically shouldn't matter much if you buy 1 share for $100 or 10 shares at $10 each. It all depends on the perceived value per share. Other things to look at are earnings growth and/or dividends. I've enjoyed reading Jim Cramer's latest 2 books.

Disclaimer: This post is not an offer to buy or sell securities. Investing involves a lot of risk. You must determine for yourself your goals and risk tolerances... possibly with the help of a licensed financial services professional. I am not one, so please don't ask me!

Capital isn't the problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

PostgreSQL has done far more with far less capital.

Since you probably won't believe me, I invite you to compare the features of each. Visiting each project's web site is a good place to start. Once you see how much further ahead PostgreSQL is technologically than MySQL, consider how they managed to accomplish that with relatively little capital.

Re:Capital isn't the problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Postgres (pre sql) was developed at UCB, so it was partially government funded. I agree that Postgresql is technologically superior, without the funding and fulltime employees that MySQL AB (and innobase) have.

Ramen

[remmelt]

The problem with your reasoning is that stockholders are very bad at long term projection. If they can turn a profit in a short time they'll jump at the chance, no matter what long term fall-out may be. This is true because stockholders don't care about the business itself but about the profit it makes. See, a typical stockholder doesn't care how good RedHat's maintenance subscription service level really is. If they can cut the service in half and still retain a number of clients, they will. This will ultimately be bad for business and it's immediately bad for customers and customer relations, but it will up the profit, so it's done.

If you would buy stock in a somewhat anonymous company, would you go and investigate what their business practices are like? Do you care about their customer service? I appreciate that there are exceptions, but most likely you won't. Yes, there are people who invest in companies that they know and care about (sports clubs come to mind,) but the majority of investors invest for a profit. If a company can turn a profit sooner rather than later, they will go for it. Most investors won't care about the database, the open sourciness, the service, the customers or anything else, but they'll care about the numbers on the yearly report. There is linkage, but if it's not apparent, if it's not 1-1 related, there won't be much interest.

Our guiding principle is "Do the Right Thing." This means doing what is best for our staff members, customers, business partners, and communities for the long term, and believing that "right" answers exist. It also means measuring our success, not merely in financial terms, but by how consistently we act according to this principle.

(From here: http://www.mathworks.com/company/aboutus/mission_v alues/)
I think that is very well said, and I think it's something that doesn't go over well for public companies. MathWorks is still privately held.

Re:Ramen

[malsdavis]

Although I agree somewhat with your point, I think you're greatly oversimplifying the issue. After all a privately owned company still has shareholders; the difference is just that not everyone can go and buy those shares as easily.

There are many different types of stockholder and although I agree going public inevitably opens up the company to the ones just looking for short term gain, its erroneous to think all stockholders think that way (many of the most savvy investors realise investing means potentially going in for the long haul). After all, unless your a hedge fund manager or such, then the chances of you making money from buying and selling stocks in the short term (i.e. less than a few years minimum) are actually pretty low.

Personally, I think the problem isn't as much about stockholders only being concerned about the short term - unless the company starts loosing money and/or avenues of revenue, when this happens stockholders do tend to panic and want random things changed - the problem is the possibility of stock holders seeing a good quality, well run, company (which happens to sell OSS) and buying a stake because they can see the company has potential but then attempting to shift the company towards a more conventional business model. This usually means less resources going towards the actual open source development and more emphasis on the revenue generating services on the side. I worry companies like Red Hat have been greatly affected from this stockholder driven change.

Re:Ramen

[Ash Vince]

The point the everyone seems to be missing with regard to stock holders is who actually gets to vote at the companies AGM. A large percentage of company chares in circulation are not owned by people, they are owned by investment companies (banks, etc) who get to block vote all the shares in one go.

For example:

Company A floats on the stock market and it share are purchased by Companies B (15%), C (10%), D(20%), E(6%) and a handful of smaller investors (49% total).

When at their AGM Company A wishes to appoint a new director they have to put it out to vote. But each person gets to vote according to the number of shares in Company A that they own. So if the directors of companies B,C,D and E get together in private and decide who they would rather put in charge, there is nothing all the smaller investors can do as even if they all voted the same way they would still only have 49%.

Now the numbers I quote above are a complete exageration but it usually amounts to the same thing in the real world. Its just that the other comanies would be made up of 10 - 20 investment houses (instead of B C D and E) and they would not initially all agree. So they would trade favours for voting the way another company would prefer in return for the same thing happening in reverse when a vote came up they veiwed as more important to their business. The have the opportunity to do this as they are still only 10 - 20 fundmanagers who probably drink at the same bar / club anyway.

Whereas the smaller investors are spread across a much wider geographical location and are much less likely to have the opportunity to meet. They are also less likely to trade favours the same way fundmanagers can as they probably dont own stock in such a wide range of companies so any favours on offer are less likely to be relevant.

This is usually the way things turn out because most of us do not own shares in a company directly, but our pensions and savings are invested on our behalf. In return for investing our money for us, the investment houses and banks get to use the vote that comes with the shares.