As the Product Manager for MySQL Enterprise and the Enterprise Monitor I am constantly being asked questions from our Sales team, prospects, customers, etc. about how our products stack up against competing products. This is tough for a PM because competitive situations change with each new release cycle and ISVs (both free/open and commercial) with agile development practices can deliver new features in very short order. Further, getting into a feature-feature discussion is a no win situation because someone will ALWAYS have more check marks. Also, I tend to be more positive about competing products because a) healthy competition makes us all better and b) my competitors enable more people to use MySQL to build apps that will most likely need MySQL support and c) the best support for MySQL comes under a MySQL Enterprise subscription! With those things in mind you will *never* hear …

There’s quite a bit of buzz on the blogosphere from people I respect a great deal, like Jeremy Cole at Proven Scaling and Vadim at Percona, about MySQL’s new Enterprise backup plans.  

The big deal?  They’re releasing a Community version that doesn’t have all the same features as the Enterprise version of Online Backup, including compression and encryption.  The Community version is open-sourced under GPL, the Enterprise version is not.

Personally, I think this is awesome. Don’t get me wrong – I love open source.  We couldn’t have built our business without it, and we love it when we get a chance to contribute back to the community.

But …