Can Sun Make MySQL Pay?

AlexGr submitted a nice followup to last weeks billion dollar Sun buyout of MySQL. He notes that "Jeff Gould presents an interesting analysis in Interop News: How can an open source software company with $70 million or so in revenue and no profits to speak of be worth $1 billion? That's the question Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been trying to answer since he bought MySQL last week. Like most commercial open source companies, MySQL makes money by enticing well-heeled customers to pay for an enterprise version of its product that comes with more bells and whistles than the community version it gives away for free. It appears though that the additional features of the Enterprise version are not enough to compensate for the revenue-destroying effects of the free Community alternative. What else could explain the surprising fact that MySQL has quietly filled out its open source portfolio with a closed source proprietary management software tool known as Enterprise Software Monitor?"

Comments

Why should this be a surprise?

[tomhudson]

"What else could explain the surprising fact that MySQL has quietly filled out its open source portfolio with a closed source proprietary management software tool known as Enterprise Software Monitor?""

They're offering better support. Haven't we always said that the rationale behind open source is you can offer the product for free, then offer paid support?

Why is it every time someone actually implements this, they're criticized?

Re:Why should this be a surprise?

[TheRealMindChild]

I think it comes down to one half of the brain fighting the other. On one side, you know the free software/support model potentially is a win for everyone. But the other side is simply taken off guard by it... even though deep down inside you knew what you were going to get, up front it seems to be a surprise.

Similar to that hot chick you have been chatting up for months online... when she told you "I am a little big, but cute", deep down, you know she is a cross between a human and a hippo, but when you finally meet her, you want to dig your eyes out with a mechanical pencil.

Re:Why should this be a surprise?

[AKAImBatman]

The article is also missing one other important fact related to this statement:

It appears though that the additional features of the Enterprise version are not enough to compensate for the revenue-destroying effects of the free Community alternative. What else could explain the surprising fact that MySQL has quietly filled out its open source portfolio with a closed source proprietary management software tool known as Enterprise Software Monitor?"

Customers don't pay for MySQL professional because it's not that great of a database. As a "free" option, there's tons of support for it. It was seen early on as "the" database for OSS work. As a result, nearly every OSS tool in existence is built around MySQL.

However, if we're talking about someone looking to pay for support, we're probably talking about a business of some sort. And for businesses, features like ANSI syntax, transactions, reliability, scalability, tools, familiarity to the DBAs, and a strong reputation for customer service are all factors that play into their decision. Why would they purchase MySQL when options like SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Informix, Pervasive, Teradata, and half a dozen other RDBMSes with stronger reputations in the market are available?

While MySQL has made great strides in their progress toward becoming a competitor in the Enterprise market, it's a bit of an uphill battle that they're going to have a hard time winning. The market sees MySQL as an OSS toy that children play with before they grow up and use a REAL database. Changing that perception is going to be hard.

Worse yet, it's a race against time before powerful new competitors like Apache Derby (formerly Cloudscape) start pushing MySQL out of the market.

That being said, I wish I invented an "OSS toy". A billion dollars as compensation sounds like a rather sweet deal. ;-)

Re:Why should this be a surprise?

[nozzo]

yeah but in that case you would just switch the lights off and think of England

Re:Why should this be a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Customers don't pay for MySQL professional because it's not that great of a database. As a "free" option, there's tons of support for it. It was seen early on as "the" database for OSS work. As a result, nearly every OSS tool in existence is built around MySQL.

However, if we're talking about someone looking to pay for support, we're probably talking about a business of some sort. And for businesses, features like ANSI syntax, transactions, reliability, scalability, tools, familiarity to the DBAs, and a strong reputation for customer service are all factors that play into their decision. Why would they purchase MySQL when options like SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Informix, Pervasive, Teradata, and half a dozen other RDBMSes with stronger reputations in the market are available?

Well, as one of the business customers who pays for MySQL Enterprise, I can tell you why we pay for MySQL. Because when our company was much smaller, and we needed a SQL server, we chose to go with MySQL because it was free, because a lot of people use it, and because some of our developers had experience with it. If we'd have been a little bit smarter at the time we would have chose Postgres, but that's water under a bridge. So we built up our company based on MySQL, and our company grew and grew. Eventually we grew to the point where we had locking issues with our MyISAM tables. Table level locking just didn't provide the concurrency we needed for our services. We then moved to InnoDB tables, which gave us the concurrency we needed. We eventually bought the InnoDB Hot Backup tool for ~$999 a copy, because the hot backups beat the dumps we were doing on our slave SQL servers. Fast forward five years. Our company is much bigger and much more profitable. We have plenty of budget to buy any SQL server we need.

However, we're stuck on MySQL because MySQL currently hosts all of our tables. Moving all of our tables en mass is simply unrealistic. We have too many clients and the downtime would be severe. When we move databases over, we have to move everything that is JOINed in any query. Most importantly, for a majority of the time that we've used MySQL, they had no stored procedure support. Therefore, all of our applications have hundreds of hard-coded queries and associated logic. Without the abstraction layer provided by stored procedures, moving our databases requires rewriting all of that code. Even worse, the hard-coded queries contain many MySQL-isms (MySQL specific syntax) and depend on MySQL behaviors, like the idea that there's a date 0000-00-00 00:00:00. Obviously there is no such date, but you'll find many MySQL databases which contain a DATETIME field and use that "0" instead of NULL. When you try to store that date on other SQL servers, or when you try to fetch that date into a typed variable in certain languages like .NET, obviously they don't allow their date/time type to contain invalid dates/times and therefore you get an exception.

I could go on and on about the issues trying to port legacy MySQL code, but the basic fact is, without stored procedures to encapsulate their vendor specific extensions, behaviors, and syntax, we have neither a hope nor a prayer of moving away from MySQL. MySQL 5.0 provided very basic stored procedure support, and we are using this as our chance to finally escape, but it's still a huge process.

Now, why are we so desperate to leave MySQL when they're the SQL server that helped us build five years of solid success and amazing growth in our company? For precisely that reason, we've grown. And as we've grown, the load on our MySQL server has grown quite a bit. So we provisioned some powerful hardware to give MySQL the CPU, memory, and disk power that it needs to do what we ask of it. But behold, our effort to give MySQL more power failed. MySQL's only production-ready engine to provide the concurrency we need (MVCC or row level locking) is InnoDB, and InnoDB's scalability is limited when it comes to a modern high end server

Java

[ForexCoder]

He misses the most obvious way of making Mysql pay and that is Java. If Sun goes down the same route that Microsoft is with Sql Server/.NET and integrates Java into Mysql, Sun gets a powerful new platform for the enterprise.

Re:Maybe it is not about Sun making money

[Tranzistors]

WITPOUAATTDIKPWIWNBUITSEA - What is the point of using ad-hoc acronym, then to dereference it, knowing perfectly well it will never be used in that sense ever again?

Mindshare

[soxos]

I've pondered this as well. What makes Youtube worth ~1.5 billion? Certainly not the technology. Sun has bought developer mindshare. When you think MySQL now, you're going to associate it with Sun. As long as they don't destroy it, it will reflect well on a company that, till now, has been floundering.

According to Torvald's biography, Linus walked out of a meeting in the 90's that Sun had called with the open-source community because the license they were introducing didn't pass his muster. It is interesting to see Sun coming around.

Of course, I could be totally wrong and we could be looking at a storm on the horizon.

Re:I didn't go to business school, but...

[The One and Only]

Wouldn't it seem like a good idea to answer those questions BEFORE spending a billion dollars?

I can tell you don't have an MBA!