MySQL drops support for most distributions

David Goodenough wrote:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1515217&from=rss

"MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16,
when its 'MySQL Network' support plan was replaced by 'MySQL Enterprise.'
MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions — Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to
sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out
from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported
on Debian OS.' We were told that 'Generic Linux' in MySQL's list of supported
platforms means 'generic versions of the implementations listed above'; not
support for Linux in general."

I *really* hope this helps convince people to migrate to PostgreSQL.
Every time I need to support MySQL I go that much more gray. :/ This
could be good.

Madi

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 10:50, David Goodenough wrote:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1515217&from=rss

"MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16,
when its 'MySQL Network' support plan was replaced by 'MySQL Enterprise.'
MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions — Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to
sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out
from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported
on Debian OS.' We were told that 'Generic Linux' in MySQL's list of supported
platforms means 'generic versions of the implementations listed above'; not
support for Linux in general."

So, in a similar vein, which PostgreSQL support companies support
Debian, for instance?

Scott Marlowe wrote:

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 10:50, David Goodenough wrote:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1515217&from=rss

"MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16,
when its 'MySQL Network' support plan was replaced by 'MySQL Enterprise.'
MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions — Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to
sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out
from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported
on Debian OS.' We were told that 'Generic Linux' in MySQL's list of supported
platforms means 'generic versions of the implementations listed above'; not
support for Linux in general."

So, in a similar vein, which PostgreSQL support companies support
Debian, for instance?

I bet Credativ does.

The good thing is that there are several companies supporting Postgres,
so whatever one of them does it does not affect the market as a whole.

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 12:01, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

Scott Marlowe wrote:

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 10:50, David Goodenough wrote:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1515217&from=rss

"MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16,
when its 'MySQL Network' support plan was replaced by 'MySQL Enterprise.'
MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions — Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to
sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out
from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported
on Debian OS.' We were told that 'Generic Linux' in MySQL's list of supported
platforms means 'generic versions of the implementations listed above'; not
support for Linux in general."

So, in a similar vein, which PostgreSQL support companies support
Debian, for instance?

I bet Credativ does.

The good thing is that there are several companies supporting Postgres,
so whatever one of them does it does not affect the market as a whole.

I was kinda thinking the same thing. Man, must suck to be tied to the
one true company for your database when they stop supporting your OS
etc...

And what about MySQL windows flavor?

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 15:01 -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

Scott Marlowe wrote:

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 10:50, David Goodenough wrote:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1515217&from=rss

"MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16,
when its 'MySQL Network' support plan was replaced by 'MySQL Enterprise.'
MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions — Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to
sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out
from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported
on Debian OS.' We were told that 'Generic Linux' in MySQL's list of supported
platforms means 'generic versions of the implementations listed above'; not
support for Linux in general."

So, in a similar vein, which PostgreSQL support companies support
Debian, for instance?

I bet Credativ does.

Command Prompt supports PostgreSQL on the following platforms:

Full Support:

Debian/Ubuntu, RH/FC, SuSE
FreeBSD (Stable releases only)
Win32
Solaris

PostgreSQL only support (meaning how to configure the OS is up to you):

Any Linux not listed above, e.g; Slackware, Mandriva etc...

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

The good thing is that there are several companies supporting Postgres,
so whatever one of them does it does not affect the market as a whole.

---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
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--

=== The PostgreSQL Company: Command Prompt, Inc. ===
Sales/Support: +1.503.667.4564 || 24x7/Emergency: +1.800.492.2240
Providing the most comprehensive PostgreSQL solutions since 1997
http://www.commandprompt.com/

Donate to the PostgreSQL Project: http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate

The good thing is that there are several companies supporting
Postgres,
so whatever one of them does it does not affect the market as a whole.

Surely there are also third-party companies that provide "support"
for MySqueal in some similar sense?

- John Burger
MITRE

John D. Burger wrote:

The good thing is that there are several companies supporting Postgres,
so whatever one of them does it does not affect the market as a whole.

Surely there are also third-party companies that provide "support" for
MySqueal in some similar sense?

There probably are, but one of the major selling points of MySQL to
corporate types is 'official' support from the 'offical' company.

--

Russ.

* John D. Burger (john@mitre.org) wrote:

The good thing is that there are several companies supporting
Postgres,
so whatever one of them does it does not affect the market as a whole.

Surely there are also third-party companies that provide "support"
for MySqueal in some similar sense?

This is, truely, a very interesting question. I'm not 100% sure about
this but I thought that the non-GPL version of MySQL was tied in with
their support contracts. If this is the case (and I could be wrong)
there's no option to go elsewhere for support if you're using the
non-GPL license (required if you don't want to give out your source code
to anything which touches MySQL, or at least that's my understanding of
how they interpret the 'derivative' concept in the GPL).

So, there may be third-party companies which provide support for the
GPL'd version of MySQL, but alot of people use the non-GPL version
because they don't want to be bound by the GPL to release their source
code. I'd be very curious if MySQL has an official say on this..

Of course, they could switch to PostgreSQL as it uses the BSD license...
:)

Thanks,

Stephen

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 13:20 -0500, John D. Burger wrote:

The good thing is that there are several companies supporting
Postgres,
so whatever one of them does it does not affect the market as a whole.

Surely there are also third-party companies that provide "support"
for MySqueal in some similar sense?

Of course :) but... Fortune 2500+ for the most part will *not* use a
third party for support for something like MySQL.

MySQL is making a pretty bold statement here. They are saying, for
business, and we mean business, we support RH and Suse which are *the*
business Linux platforms.

It really isn't that different that was most other commercial entities
do.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

- John Burger
MITRE

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--

=== The PostgreSQL Company: Command Prompt, Inc. ===
Sales/Support: +1.503.667.4564 || 24x7/Emergency: +1.800.492.2240
Providing the most comprehensive PostgreSQL solutions since 1997
http://www.commandprompt.com/

Donate to the PostgreSQL Project: http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate

In response to "John D. Burger" <john@mitre.org>:

The good thing is that there are several companies supporting
Postgres,
so whatever one of them does it does not affect the market as a whole.

Surely there are also third-party companies that provide "support"
for MySqueal in some similar sense?

Couple of years ago when I was part owner of a company, we tried to
become an "official" MySQL support provider.

Now, this is a three man operation, we had about 10 clients and were
looking to expand into the MySQL space.

We found the money MySQL wanted to become "official" to be excessive.
Additionally, for that money, we didn't get promised anything -- we
couldn't even get an estimate of how many potential clients there
would be in our area. After much discussion with the MySQL people,
we finally decided it was too much money to take the risk.

I wonder how many other potential support companies felt the same
way? Perhaps that was a bad business decision on our part, but we'll
never know now -- we shut the company down a year ago.

Anyway, I guess my point is that it was a whole lot easier to get
listed as a company supporting PostgreSQL than it was MySQL. We were
listed on the commercial support part of the site the entire time we
were in business -- got at least one client from it. I don't think
we did any MySQL support the whole time we were in business.

Perhaps big companies with lotsa money wouldn't find MySQL's offerings
to be a bad deal, but we couldn't justify it and I suspect a lot of
small companies can't.

Anyway, now I do PostgreSQL work for Collaborative Fusion and I'm
much happier because it's not my job to worry about those kind of
business relationship decisions -- there are competent people handling
that.

--
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.

wmoran@collaborativefusion.com
Phone: 412-422-3463x4023

Joshua D. Drake wrote:

Surely there are also third-party companies that provide "support"
for MySqueal in some similar sense?

Of course :) but... Fortune 2500+ for the most part will *not* use a
third party for support for something like MySQL.

Sure, but they won't use PG either, for essentially the same reason,
since =all= PG support is "third party".

- John Burger
MITRE

John D. Burger wrote:

Sure, but they won't use PG either, for essentially the same reason,
since =all= PG support is "third party".

They would probably use EnterpriseDB though :-)

--
Tony Caduto
AM Software Design
http://www.amsoftwaredesign.com
Home of PG Lightning Admin for Postgresql
Your best bet for Postgresql Administration

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 13:00 -0600, Tony Caduto wrote:

John D. Burger wrote:

Sure, but they won't use PG either, for essentially the same reason,
since =all= PG support is "third party".

They would probably use EnterpriseDB though :-)

Or Command Prompt like several extremely large companies already do ;)

Joshua D. Drake

--

=== The PostgreSQL Company: Command Prompt, Inc. ===
Sales/Support: +1.503.667.4564 || 24x7/Emergency: +1.800.492.2240
Providing the most comprehensive PostgreSQL solutions since 1997
http://www.commandprompt.com/

Donate to the PostgreSQL Project: http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate

Hi,

John D. Burger wrote:

Sure, but they won't use PG either, for essentially the same reason,
since =all= PG support is "third party".

Maybe. But at least these third parties can take the source and build
their own product on top of it, without significant limitations.

So one can debate if i.e. EnterpriseDB is providing third party support
for PostgreSQL or first-hand support for their own product :-)

Regards

Markus

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 13:37 -0500, Bill Moran wrote:

In response to "John D. Burger" <john@mitre.org>:

The good thing is that there are several companies supporting
Postgres,
so whatever one of them does it does not affect the market as a whole.

Surely there are also third-party companies that provide "support"
for MySqueal in some similar sense?

Couple of years ago when I was part owner of a company, we tried to
become an "official" MySQL support provider.

Now, this is a three man operation, we had about 10 clients and were
looking to expand into the MySQL space.

We found the money MySQL wanted to become "official" to be excessive.
Additionally, for that money, we didn't get promised anything -- we
couldn't even get an estimate of how many potential clients there
would be in our area. After much discussion with the MySQL people,
we finally decided it was too much money to take the risk.

I wonder how many other potential support companies felt the same
way? Perhaps that was a bad business decision on our part, but we'll
never know now -- we shut the company down a year ago.

What you describe above is a very similar thing that brought CMD (as its
current incarnation) into being.

We tried to get tier 4 support from a little known company called Great
Bridge years ago....

The basic idea was that we would call them maybe 4 times a year but
wanted to work with them because they had the "name" for PostgreSQL.

They wanted 16k a year.

Now they are dust, and CMD is what it is today ;)

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

--

=== The PostgreSQL Company: Command Prompt, Inc. ===
Sales/Support: +1.503.667.4564 || 24x7/Emergency: +1.800.492.2240
Providing the most comprehensive PostgreSQL solutions since 1997
http://www.commandprompt.com/

Donate to the PostgreSQL Project: http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate

Markus Schiltknecht <markus@bluegap.ch> writes:

John D. Burger wrote:

Sure, but they won't use PG either, for essentially the same reason,
since =all= PG support is "third party".

So one can debate if i.e. EnterpriseDB is providing third party support
for PostgreSQL or first-hand support for their own product :-)

The other point I'd make against John's argument is that there are a
whole lot of Fortune 500 companies buying Red Hat support, and RH is
effectively a third party for large chunks of Linux. (Of course,
there are also large chunks for which Red Hat employees write as much
code as anyone; but certainly that's not true for every package.)

I think the real criterion for big companies is not so much whether
you're supporting your "own" product as whether you're big enough to
be worth suing if things go wrong.

regards, tom lane

Tom Lane wrote:

The other point I'd make against John's argument is that there are a
whole lot of Fortune 500 companies buying Red Hat support, and RH is
effectively a third party for large chunks of Linux. (Of course,
there are also large chunks for which Red Hat employees write as much
code as anyone

Yeah, I've heard that. :)

I think the real criterion for big companies is not so much whether
you're supporting your "own" product as whether you're big enough to
be worth suing if things go wrong.

I think you're right, and MySQL is unlikely to allow anybody else to
get that big.

- John Burger
MITRE

Joshua D. Drake wrote:

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 13:20 -0500, John D. Burger wrote:

Surely there are also third-party companies that provide "support"
for MySqueal in some similar sense?

Yeah. HP for example [links below]. HP announced support
for Debian and MySQL (and the JBoss Stack as well).

Of course :) but... Fortune 2500+ for the most part will *not* use a
third party for support for something like MySQL.

You've got to be kidding.

Surely many Fortune 2500+ would prefer their MySQL support
from HP than from a little company like MySQL-AB, wouldn't
they?

http://h20219.www2.hp.com/services/cache/442408-0-0-225-121.html
http://h20219.www2.hp.com/services/cache/390925-0-0-0-121.html

FWIW, there is a follow-up note on the original posting from a MySQL person:

"we are just starting to roll out [Enterprise] binaries... We don't build binaries for Debian in part because the Debian community does a good job themselves... If you call MySQL and you have support we support you if you are running Debian (the same with Suse, RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu and others)... someone in Sales was left with the wrong information"

Greg Williamson
DBA
GlobeXplorer LLC

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org on behalf of Scott Marlowe
Sent: Wed 12/13/2006 10:11 AM
To: Alvaro Herrera
Cc: David Goodenough; pgsql general
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] MySQL drops support for most distributions

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 12:01, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

Scott Marlowe wrote:

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 10:50, David Goodenough wrote:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1515217&amp;from=rss

"MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16,
when its 'MySQL Network' support plan was replaced by 'MySQL Enterprise.'
MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions — Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to
sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out
from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported
on Debian OS.' We were told that 'Generic Linux' in MySQL's list of supported
platforms means 'generic versions of the implementations listed above'; not
support for Linux in general."

So, in a similar vein, which PostgreSQL support companies support
Debian, for instance?

I bet Credativ does.

The good thing is that there are several companies supporting Postgres,
so whatever one of them does it does not affect the market as a whole.

I was kinda thinking the same thing. Man, must suck to be tied to the
one true company for your database when they stop supporting your OS
etc...

And what about MySQL windows flavor?

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