MPP and Beyond

When we decided to use MySQL for email archival we thought it would be a good idea for a number of reasons. First of all, MySQL is readily available and is included in most Unix based OS’s. Secondly, we thought that we could leverage MySQL to help us spread the word about our great application of MySQL. Lastly, we thought that this would be a good technical choice. However, we have found that only one of our 3 rationals has held up.

Technically the solution is solid. MySQL full-text search is getting better and better and MySQL is stable. We have some reasonably large databases and MySQL seems to have no problems with scale, witin reason. We have seen multi-million rows kill a db that was not managed properly, but beyond these issues, which we could fix w/ tuning there have been no technical issues w/ MySQL yet.

The big shocker has been that MySQL could care less about a small ISV trying to build a really cool application that is applicable to businesses of all sizes. We thought that MySQL would have some channel to market the solution, but they really have no intelligible ISV strategy for small ISV’s.

The second shocker was that our customers would think that using MySQL was a great idea. Instead we have found that no one really cares which DB we use. They just want email archival and retrieval to work, which it does. They want to be able to search and retreive email fast, but could care less about the underlying database.

So, so much for assumptions….

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