In the December episode of our “Meet The MySQL Experts” podcast, we chose to focus on MySQL Technical Support. Todd Farmer, Director of Oracle’s MySQL Global Support team, gives us insights into his organization, talking about who Oracle’s MySQL Support engineers are, how they help customers on a day-to-day basis, how they interact with the MySQL engineering and the bugs verification teams, and more…

Listen to the podcast to learn more about this team of MySQL Experts!

To better understand the value Oracle Premier Support for MySQL represents for your organization, get our white paper “Oracle Premier Support for MySQL: Rely on The …

Included in all MySQL commercial editions subscriptions, Oracle Premier Support for MySQL can help you make the most of your MySQL deployments.

Organizations choose to purchase technical support from software vendors for various reasons, many seeing it as an insurance policy. Indeed, much as they would not drive a car without insurance, IT managers consider it good practice to be able to call on the company behind the software they are using should they encounter any issue.

However, Oracle Premier Support for MySQL offers benefits far beyond "insurance", value you can leverage even if you never experience problems.

Get our new white paper “Oracle Premier Support for MySQL: Rely on The Experts, Get Unique Benefits”, to better understand the value …

Included in all MySQL commercial editions subscriptions, Oracle Premier Support for MySQL can help you make the most of your MySQL deployments.

Organizations choose to purchase technical support from software vendors for various reasons, many seeing it as an insurance policy. Indeed, much as they would not drive a car without insurance, IT managers consider it good practice to be able to call on the company behind the software they are using should they encounter any issue.

However, Oracle Premier Support for MySQL offers benefits far beyond "insurance", value you can leverage even if you never experience problems.

Get our new white paper “Oracle Premier Support for MySQL: Rely on The Experts, Get Unique Benefits”, to better understand the value …

Sometimes I get questions as to whether Pythian is one of the competitors battling with Oracle for MySQL support. The answer lies in the distinction of product support and operational support.

At Pythian, we are laser focused on supporting applications and data infrastructure using Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server products. A vast majority of our Oracle customers (there are few customers who have very old 7.x and 8.x products running without vendor support) have Oracle maintenance subscriptions that include product updates and product support. Product support entitles the customer to open support requests when the product doesn’t perform according to the specifications (bug reports) as well as fill in enhancement requests. It also covers deployment blue-prints and deployment guidelines in the official …

A catchy headline, and I believe more accurate than Oracle Puts the Squeeze on SMBs with MySQL Price Hike (Network World) and MySQL price hikes reveal depth of Oracle’s wallet love [MySQL Jacking up MySQL Prices] (The Register). Slightly more realistic is Oracle kills low-priced MySQL support (again The Register).

First, let’s review what Oracle has actually done: they ditched the MySQL enterprise Basic and Silver offerings. For Oracle, that makes sense. Their intended client base is “enterprise” (high end, think big corporates) and their MySQL sales and cost structure reflects this. It’s not a new thing that came with MySQL at Oracle, because MySQL at Sun …

Oracle has released news about changing policies of MySQL Enterprise Support effectively dropping annual support for Basic and Silver. The entry level support is now $3000 per server per year. The MySQL support team now part of Oracle has great resources however Oracle is in the business of making money. When a general company question for OOW is company income, and the first option is < $50 million it highlights that startups, and smaller companies are clearly not a focus.

The success of MySQL as an open source company has lead to other leading providers that now can provide enterprise level support. More importantly many organizations over per-incident support which is more cost effect. News in the past week has included Percona - …

When asking about up-time requirements set down in SLAs (Service Level Agreements) with our clients’ clients, we’d hear anything ranging from hours to the familiar five nines, but these days also simply 100% and otherwise penalties apply. From my perspective, there’s not much difference between five nines and 100%, 99.999% uptime over a year amounts to a maximum of little over 5 minutes outage. In many cases, this includes scheduled outages!

So, we can just not have any outages, scheduled or otherwise. Emergency support is not going to help here, because however fast and good they are, you’re already in serious penalty time or well on your way to not having a business any more. Most will respond within say 30 minutes but then need up to a few hours to resolve the issue. That won’t help you, really, will it? And in any case, how are you going to do your maintenance? The answer is, you need to architect things differently.

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At this year’s conference, I was pleasantly surprised with the high level of interest in Open Query’s proactive services for MySQL and MariaDB, and specifically our focus on preventing problems, while explicitly not offering emergency services.

I’ll describe what this is about first, and why I reckon it’s interesting. When you think about it, most IT related support that includes emergency (24×7) operates similar to this:

You have a house that has the front and back doors wide open with no locks, and you take out an insurance policy for the house contents. After a short time you call the insurance company “guess what, the most terrible thing happened, my TV got stolen.” Insurance company responds “that’s dreadful, you poor soul, let us fix it all up for you with getting a new TV and installing it. It’ll be our pleasure to serve you.” A few weeks later you call the insurance company again …

After some testing and setup we have decided to use Eventum for our support ticketing needs. This featureful system will be in use for all of your support questions related to Kontrollbase – the MySQL analytics and performance tuning web application, as well as Kontrollkit – the collection of server automation scripts. You can read [...]