MySQL Enterprise Support Options Hit The Street

MySQL's new enterprise-class support option, including a new network monitoring dashboard, is now available, the company said Monday.

Announced last month, this edition will make it easier for VARs or integrators to keep a watchful eye on database performance to nip problems in the bud, says Sheery Kritzer, founder of the Boston MySQL User Group.

"This isn't just a new version of the softwareit has different service and support capabilities," she noted. "Even the community binary version of MySQL is robust enough for production use, but the enterprise version ships with an enterprise dashboard, it shows you charts of how much database activity there is, how many connections were made. It'll show you when the query cache isor is notin good shape and help you do good preventative maintenance."

Having a central place to find data on system performance, and having a graphical view of that performance is indispensible, she added.

Often, a database will run for a long time and performance will slowly degrade. That slow-down can be caused by many variables--the query cache hit ratio is too low or log buffers are too small. Anything that can pinpoint those problems before they hurt performance is helpful both for internal DBAs and third-party integrators who implement and service databases..

MySQL competes with PervasiveDB and other open-source oriented databases.

MySQL runs on a full array of Unix operating systems as well as Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Service support options range from $595 to $4,995 per year.

The monitoring and alerts service is available only with the higher-tier silver, gold and platinum support packages which range from $1,995 to $4,995 per year. For full pricing see this company Web site.

MySQL's U.S. headquarters is in Cupertino, Calif.