January 30th, 2007
MySQL tries disruptive pricing to attract customers
While Oracle and Sun are going after Red Hat Linux with lower pricing models for support and service, MySQL is making pricing a move to attract customers to its open source database. The company announced MySQL Enterprise Unlimited, claiming that customers who have Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase or DB2 Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs) can save over $1 million.
For the fixed price of a single Oracle CPU license (about $40,000) per year, customers can deploy MySQL Enterprise Gold–which is $2,995 per server per year–across their entire organization. The fee includes monitoring and advisory services, all you can consume 24×7 problem resolution support, 100 hours of consultative support, 20 support contacts and monthly updates and quarterly service packs. Gold service doesn't include services such as performance tuning, schema reviews or code reviews of client APIs, user-defined functions, server extensions or stored procedures, triggers and functions.
While the Unlimited service will attract attention of the thousand of customers spending big bucks with the big four database companies, it will probably do more in the short term to attract MySQL enterprise database customers who download the software but don't pay MySQL a cent for service and support. Good move, especially if Oracle begins to offer support for MySQL as it has done for Red Hat.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
