I guess this model is suitable for the customer base that Sun/MySQL want, but not for me so the only thing left for me to do is built my own Tools, with Blackjack and Hookers I don’t consider it expensive, it’s just not what I need and want.

That is the whole model! Having support mandatory part of the package allows you to justify charging subscription for it otherwise you could just buy software and use it for years compromising MySQL revenue and financial stability

Futhermore note this:

http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/features.html

Many software features are only available in software shipped with high Enterprise subscription level. You see advertised price of some $600 per server per year for MySQL Enterprise ? But wait if you want to have any cool features like Replication monitoring or Query Analyzer you’ll pay $3000 even though these are features which should allow you to give you self help and actually reduce need for MySQL Support.

If you’re looking for things like Performance Adviser you’ve got to pay whole $5000 for each server per year.

One interesting thing about Enterprise is probably that you have a stronger say in what gets fixed and which features are added.

We are building our business on open source components, we widely use Linux, Apache, PHP, Sphinx, MySQL and many others. Do you see something wrong about it? And yes, we really appreciate that Linux developers give filesystem ext3 for free, we say thanks to Apache developers that they do not close mod_status and do not ask money for it. We are happy that PHP developers have php_db* functions open for everyone. And Sphinx developer Andrew Aksenoff made it available for everybody just to make some sense of FullText search nowadays. And – yes, thanks to Sun we still can download source code from dev.mysql.com.

Vadim,

Enterprise isn’t just “server”, it’s server plus support plus tools so its subscriptions are packaged and priced based on the costs and benefits of the mixture of features it provides.

5.0 Community has no partitioning and has never had it.
5.1 Enterprise has no partitioning and has never had it but includes support subscriptions and the excellent Enterprise Manager software.

5.1 Pro has MySQL support, Enterprise Manager and the various 5.1 additions and performance improvements.
5.1 Advanced has 5.1 Pro features and adds support for partitioning as well.
5.1 Community has no support at all from MySQL’s support team but includes partitioning in the server, without MySQL support.

All get something added and nobody who is using 5.0GA will have anything cut out by upgrading to 5.1GA.

It’s natural enough that you as a third party support provider might view just the Community server as the full thing and ignore the MySQL support and Enterprise Manager to sell your own services instead. Describing it as a cut is misleading when it’s a new feature, though.

MySQL could have chosen not to add partitioning to the GA Community server, leaving you and other third party providers with no option to use or sell support for it. We have added it so you do get the chance to sell support and tool add-ons for it, just as we do.

Best wishes for a profitable new year built on the components we’re freely choosing to provide to you!

I think there is not so much more options to cut.

Well, Sun can build
MySQL Enterprise Server – Startup Edition
without csv, example and federated storage engines.