Monday, June 16, 2008

To MySQL or not to MySQL

This blog will report on random thoughts within the company at any point in time, and we decided to open with a big question we are discussing these days: to MySQL or not to MySQL? Namely, is it worth it to go into the MySQL Market?

We had lots of success in the SQL Server world. Can we replicate it in MySQL? On the surface, the answer is ‘yes’; and why not? It’s a huge market, there aren’t many tools out there, there will be almost no competition, and we could leverage some of our existing code base.

But then again, we must ask ourselves: what’s the catch? How come such a huge market has so little tools to it? True, it’s new. But it’s not THAT new. And in our super competitive industry, each problem means a dozen or more startups within few months offering to fix it. Why is the 3rd party tools market for MySQL is so small, and the tools that do exist seem, at least at first glance, so buggy and unstable? (We don’t want to mention names, but we’ve tried few of the most popular 3rd party commercial tools for MySQL on the market today, and by comparison they seem so pre-mature that they would not have much chance in there)

The answer would seem obvious. MySQL people, while being intelligent, very much open to new things and highly enthusiastic about new ‘toys’, simply don’t like to pay. My conclusion is that this is what it all comes down to. Anything that smells of commercialism and profit, so much welcomed in the Microsoft world, simply stinks here. This is open source world, people like it that way (otherwise, they would be with Microsoft, or elsewhere, but not here) and they wish it to stay that way. Every newcomer intending on making profit from that environment is looked upon as a foreign invader.

We already have one tool that supports MySQL (http://www.nobhillsoft.com/DataProfiler.aspx) and although we are giving it for free, we still ran into some resistance among MySQL users – perhaps because we are a for-profit entity, which means we use words like ‘customer’ when referring to the users, which they didn’t really like.

So, is that it? Is that the ‘catch’ involved, and the reason there are relatively few tools for MySQL? We would really like to know your thoughts. We are definitely looking to get into that market and fill it with our goods. But – we are honest people and as such we wish to be clear about our intentions – we are here to make money. And hopefully plenty of it. Can our mentality operate successfully in this new sphere?And, if you’d be so kind as to respond, do let us know what tools are most urgently lacking in the field; the more we think about the possibilities, the more exciting it gets

Many Thanks

Jonathan