I think there is a difference what kind of services we offer. We do not always provide full operation support to the clients. Sometimes we cover everything, sometimes we focus on MySQL only and sometimes the client may have their own DBAs to keep things rolling so we just come and fix what is broken. This is customer choice which they make on cost and convenience reasons – for example many like to keep operations in house and this is fine with us. We also would not take responsibilities which we can’t handle. For example we have been helping people running MySQL on Windows in production to tune their queries but we would not do full operations support on Windows because we do not have enough experience with it. We also do not think it is good idea At the same time we would not always push people to move to Linux/Unix – is shop moving away from MS SQL for cost reason having no Linux experience but years of running large scale Windows based data centers can well stay with Windows.

We try not to force customers to do things in a certain ways. We give our recommendations and customers can follow our advice or do things their own way. Doing things wrong way may increase their support costs or may make it impossible for us to help them – for example if customer choses to have just replication and no backups we may not be able to help them to recover the data if someone runs update which trashed data. It is also possible for customers to pick technology which do not support – ie use Oracle, in this case they just would need someone else help with these systems.

This is the core responsibility of any managed service provider. At rackAID, we often tell people NO. We tell them no, because there is no compelling reason to adopt the technology they are requesting. They will only see increased support costs with no measurable improvement in service. Based on Percona’s reputation, I would expect the same from them.

The license for Percona patches is GPL and MySQL Enterprise sources is also GPL so you can use MySQL with Percona patches free of charge if you comply with GPL requirements.

Thank you for not telling people to use Drizzle right now

It really is not ready, and no one should be putting it into production/testing with it. Right now we just want contributors of all shades.

Now will Drizzle be taking patches from you? I certainly suspect I will be pulling some of your patches. We have been taking bits from Google and Ebay so far (plus a few from other companies). Our I_S is being rewritten and once it is done I expect we will be looking at what you and Proven Scaling has been doing.

Cheers,
-Brian