I think in reality Pythian stays a bit asides from other companies you mention which have less differences between them. For example we do a lot of Architecture Design work performance audit and other things, we however unlike other companies advertise our ability to handle emergencies as well. We do not do Training as Open Query - you’re right about this, though we’ve done number of adhoc training sessions for the companies. Regarding smaller businesses in fact we deal with a lot of these as well. Though perception can be different.

I’m glad you had a chance to talk to Paul; it really is a pleasure to work for him. And you’re right about our companies not really being in “competition” — I was talking at the conference to Arjen Lentz and commenting about how there are a lot of community members that have companies, and we all technically compete but not really — Percona is more for emergencies, Proven Scaling is more for architecture, Pythian is more for day-to-day DBA stuff, Open Query is for smaller businesses and for training needs.

So somehow we manage to all get along even though we’re “competitors”. It was good to see you at the conference!