I have gotten a few questions around my 7/29 blog posting on agent vs client-side products and wanted to make it clear that our decision to go with a distributed agent architecture was a strategic decision that has paved the way for us to deliver on our overall "pain point" addressing roadmap. True, building a client-side app would have meant a faster go-to-market delivery, but that path would have imposed serious limitations on our ability to address and alleviate common pain points around the use and scaling of apps on MySQL.

So what does an agent really do for us from a strategic standpoint? Without revealing too many details (well, these things have already been openly discussed with customers and presented in our MySQL UC 2008 Product roadmap session), our agent-based architecture allows us to provide:
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Today I attended a webex demo of MySQL Enterprise Monitor from MySQL. As most of the Yahoo’s are interested in learning about this tool, so arranged a web-ex demo from MySQL. MySQL is kind enough to host this event.

I always thought a dedicated monitoring and alerting system is completely missing from MySQL product line for all these days, and I can see that this tool is heading in the right direction to capture the market. Currently it monitors all server variables, errors and identifies any critical conditions upfront to avoid a disaster. But the new features that are in the pipeline for the coming months seemed to be promising (like upgrade adviser, Load balancing, query analyzer and connection manager).

As this is not like a single node …