Dealing with churn, is one of the most important elements of building a subscription business.  While some churn is inevitable over time, too much churn indicates a more fundamental problem: customers aren't finding value in your product.  

I wrote an article over at GigaOm on this subject including some examples about how to reduce churn from my experience at MySQL and Zendesk.

Having churn is like rowing a leaky boat. After a while, you spend more time bailing water than moving forward. By contrast, organizations that focus on reducing churn will find that their revenue grows every quarter.

To accurately measure what’s going on, you should begin by breaking out churn (customer cancellation) from …

Yesterday’s WebScaleSQL announcement marks yet another win for collaboration and openness.

It opens up a treasure chest of database innovations built by the Internet leaders in order to scale their services to hundreds of millions of users. While some code was available earlier, the commitments made now ensure higher levels of quality and greater ease of access. These innovations increase significantly the diversity of contributions in the MySQL and MariaDB community.

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This week we discuss more software licenses, concluding our 3-part series on licenses. Ear Candy is what happens when ALTER TABLE crashes, and At the Movies is Jon Day of SkySQL presenting MaxScale.

Events
Percona Live

DB Hangops - every other Wednesay at noon Pacific time

Upcoming MySQL events

Training
SkySQL Trainings
Tungsten University trainings

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Gigaom published today the news of the latest addition to the SkySQL Management Team. I'd like to share a couple of snippets from the news:

“Roger Levy says SkySQL will move into a relational database innovation phase now, rather than just trying to provide an alternative to Oracle’s MySQL.” - that’s how Giagom’s article today summary’s the latest news from SkySQL.

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FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium was a great community event again this year. The MySQL community booth was maned by Oracle MySQL, Percona, Galera and MariaDB. Thanks Kenny, Liz & co for also organising a fun community dinner on Saturday! The MySQL dev room was packed with participants listening to some very interesting presentations, amongst them MaxScale, which got some considerable interest from the audience.

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There is a good article over at Re-Code by ex-Microsoft VP Steven Sinofsky called "The Four Stages of Disruption".  It describes the evolution of products and markets through disruption, drawing from Sinofsky's own insights and also building on the work of Everett Rogers ("The Diffusion of Innovations") and Clayton Christensen ("The …

PalominoDB CEO Laine Campbell presented this class at the O'Reilly Velocity Conference, NYC Oct 2013. The class is broken into two videos and is a total of 85 minutes.

Click here for Part 1 - Click here for Part 2

Laine will explain the options for running MySQL at high volumes at Amazon Web Services, exploring options around database as a service, hosted instances/storages and all appropriate availability, performance and provisioning considerations using real-world examples from Call of Duty, Obama for America and many more.

Laine will show how to build highly available, manageable and performant MySQL environments that scale in AWS—how to maintain then, grow them and deal with failure. Some of the specific topics covered are:

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Shiv is the Vice President of International Operations at PalominoDB. He has been a database operations strategist for companies such as; LinkedIn, Microsoft, SUN, National Iran Oil Co. and lastminute.com.

He has taught and been a keynote speaker for database technology conferences globally, speaking on; Database Architecture, High Performance, Database Health Check, 24*7*365 DBA Operations, High Availability and Managed Database Service Operations.

He is a Database Architect specialist in PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server and passionate about DBA process automation and maximum return on investment from database infrastructure. He is the founder and CEO for Ask DB Experts, a boutique private label Database Architect Consulting Practice & Remote DBA services company based out of Bangalore, India.

He is a marathon runner and very active in supporting NGOs in fund raising marathon events.

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A few years back, along with some folks at MySQL and in the open source community, we helped kick off a campaign against software patents in Europe.  This was a hot topic and surprisingly, it seemed no large companies were willing to step up the fight.  As a relatively young company, MySQL had a lot to lose if someone went on the attack against us using patents.  While we had a very small number of patents in our portfolio (mostly through acquisitions), we help them only for defensive purposes.  

It's been interesting to see some stories come out from NPR's Planet Money and This American Life shows that shed more light on software patents.  The …

Join us at the next MySQL & Cloud Database Solutions Day hosted by SkySQL & MariaDB in Berlin on June 18th

It’s a beautiful day in Berlin today and we’re putting the final touches to next week’s MySQL & Cloud Database Solutions Day, which takes place on Tuesday June 18th in the facilities provided by Bitkom in Berlin Mitte.

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