Database Administration is a tough, often ungrateful job. Especially if you run a 24/7 business-critical MySQL or MariaDB deployment.

MySQL has proven to be a remarkably solid database which supports billions of dollars in revenue. On some level this very solidity creates a false sense of security. There are many things that can wrong at any given time, whether that is a change to your app, a bug in the database, hardware failure or just simply running out of disk space.

Percona recently conducted a poll: “What keeps you up at night?”

Not surprisingly, “Downtime/HA” is very high on the list.

While there are many challenging issues and tasks that a DBA must deal …

This is the first in a series of blog articles in which I will discuss the changing landscape of open source and money. Or, more specifically, open source databases and money. And even more specifically MySQL and its all variants (AWS Aurora, MariaDB, Percona Server, RDS/MySQL) and money. But before going too deep into what is changing, let’s review all the traditional business models in and around the MySQL marketplace.

In general, these are the following types of companies in the MySQL commercial ecosystem, sorted by total annual revenue and addressable market size:

• Developers who do not aim to monetize the open source code, just provide value to others and hope to get development and other contributions in return. This is the purest form of open source. For example, all …