June 15th, 2007
A Blessing in Disguise
MySQL's latest advertising campaign (called "The 12 Days of Scaleout") is getting a bit of a kicking in the MySQL blog space.
I am sure that this is slightly uncomfortable for the MySQL team, but at the same time the team is lucky that people who care about MySQL still take the time to explain what they don't like.
Perhaps it would be a good time for them to go back and add some meat to the case studies?
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Posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 0:10
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June 15th, 2007 at 4:48
[...] was mostly busy with the The 12 Days of Scaleout campaign of the MySQL AB as pointed out by Zak Greant. Ronald Bradford summarized some of the tips he found useful about Wikipedia’s use of MySQL [...]
June 15th, 2007 at 8:07
Zak,
nice to hear from you. Always good to get feedback on what we're doing. The 12 days campaign is targeted more towards non-technical folks (e.g. CIOs, IT Directors) but its a good point that our technical audience wants more meat. We will be developing some of these examples into case studies in the coming weeks to have more technical information. In the meantime if there are any tips or examples other folks want to share on the "how to" of scaling out, that's always appreciated. And I'm encouraging some of the more technical folks at MySQL to add their insights also.
–Zack
PS. I hope it's not too hot in Calgary this summer!
June 15th, 2007 at 9:09
Hey Zack,
I'm out in Vancouver now - which tends to have pretty mild summers. I moved out a few years ago to work for a startup right after I left MySQL.
As for the campaign, I think that there may be a difference between who it is intended for and who reads it. We know that developers are reading the materials and think that it is intended for them. Even more, they are commenting on it, where as I haven't seen any real feedback from the intended audience.
It makes me wonder if having a section that is clearly just for non-developers would make sense - then it would be harder for your audiences to get confused about what is for them.
Cheers!
–zak
June 15th, 2007 at 11:14
I've assumed that many developers just go directly to the developer zone http://dev.mysql.com and safely ignore anything on our home page that talks about TCO, CIO, ROI or other non-technical acronyms, but I could be wrong.
A couple of weeks ago we created a CIO corner, but its still in its early stages. The idea is to try to make it easier for folks to find the information they are seeking, whether it's technical folks looking for hardcore information or business people looking for high-level benefits of open source. You can find the CIO corner here:
http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/cio-corner/
–Zack
June 18th, 2007 at 7:30
(directed at Mr. Urlocker)
It's all well and good to post things up on the main site and assume that most tech folk will miss it by virtue of going straight to dev.mysql.com, and maybe that's even the case. But the Twelve Days bits are going out over PlanetMySQL, as well, and I'd guess that the Developer/Executive ration is a bit more heavily skewed in the other direction on that front.
That said, I do think there's some interesting stuff in there, and I'm looking forward to seeing some of the more in depth case studies you mentioned.