Date: 2008-04-06 08:50 Subject: The magic $99 offering - MySQL vs Open Query Security: Public

Reading Mike Zinner's What Does a Workbench SE Subscription Include?, I noticed something other may not fuss about... for $99/seat you get a year of updates, and the basic license does not expire at all.

Workbench has an interesting history... Mike originally wrote DB Designer 4. I first met Mike years ago at a LinuxTag (2003). The program rocked. I introduced Mike to Kaj and said "you two should talk". And thus Mike got hired. He's since been in charge of the MySQL GUI tools, but the successors of DB Designer kept being put off and restarted from scratch: different/changing development priorities and lack of people resources....

I'm still interested in Workbench, although I am concerned that this is like the 3rd iteration of the product, and it now has .Net dependencies. Will it work under Mono? Yes, so we're told; the roadmap says the other platforms will be released once the Windows version is stable. Deliver the goods quickly, Mike! If you turn out to be wrong, Linux and Mac users will not be happy. So please the other platforms quicker!

Anyway, I find the $99 pricing of interest, since it finally delivers a $99 offering that MySQL can sell through its online shop. That's been notably absent since forever. Once someone is a customer, you have a relationship with them and it's easier to sell more and different things - the customer is also more likely to also buy bigger things over time. The threshold of entry for becoming a MySQL customer has always been around $500 for a basic support subscription though, which is just too high. They ("we" at the time ;-) never came up with an cheap offering that was deemed viable by all relevant departments. Personally, I favoured a cheap entry-level support offering. Ohwell.

Putting my money where my mouth is, Open Query has had a cheap entry offering since launch time. Scheduled remote (phone/email/login) support/consulting is charged at $100/hr (that's in Australian dollars - and I don't bother with the $99 foo) and has no exclusions - optimisation and replication is covered. Since most issues involve optimisation in some way anyway, you may find this comforting ;-)

So, why this cheap? Well, cheap is relative. Others offer similar services at a higher price, but that's not my reason for going lower. First of all, I wanted to have an offering with a low entry threshold, and support is still the service with the broadest reach. Also, charging more just means you go upmarket (bigger companies), since smaller businesses and poor startups just can't afford it.

What market do we operate in? Open Query has big(ger) customers also and they sometimes giggle when they learn of my pricing ("too cheap!"). But by reputation of its principals they trust that we deliver quality, so we don't need to charge more to get respected. Big companies also have shrinking budgets, so my pricing actually enables them to use my services more. And there are lots of smaller companies, so we have a fairly broad base in the marketplace.

In terms of sales effort, the pricing makes it a "no brainer" so there's a no tedious sales cycle. And the Open Query business cost structure is lean. Low overheads enable this kind of offering. We're happy to deal with more smaller customers. On-site and unscheduled consulting both have higher rates, but are still very affordable for "small fry" too.

95% of Australian businesses are 1-5 people; the percentage in the US could be similar, although it's a bigger country (about 10x in terms of population) which means the total pool of bigger companies is larger, and that perhaps is why many just aim for the big fish. It's a valid choice, but a) I don't want to have high overheads and Open Query's base pricing is a good reason to keep that in mind, and b) MySQL in particular has a huge low-end/startup uptake, so from my perspective it'd be silly to price us out of that market. Some small fish grow big too (sometimes quickly), and they remain happy Open Query customers throughout.

Date: 2008-04-06 19:55 Subject: When hardware and monitoring is important: diskspace Security: Public

There was just a thread on the Freenode #mysql IRC channel with someone wanting to switch off and delete their binary logs. Why? Because they were short on diskspace.
Mind you, this was a production system, so generally it's rather a bad idea to disable binary logging there, unless you really don't value your data - but in that case you might as well just close down your shop now ;-)
This is not about MySQL reliability, but hardware can and will fail, and all kinds of other things can and will go wrong over time.

While I appreciate the jam this person was in today: choosing between not being online at all, and disabling the binlog for now.... it's so much better to prevent this. I actually hear about database servers running out of disk space quite often so this is a common event!
It's something to keep a close eye on, for instance using Nagios, and have an alert blip if space drops below a certain threshold. It can also be useful (for space management, safety and in certain cases also performance) to have tablespace, InnoDB and the binlogs each on separate volumes.