Years ago when I worked for the MySQL Support organization at the original MySQL AB, we spoke about MySQL Support as insurance and focused on a value proposition similar to that of car insurance. For your car to be fully covered, you must purchase car insurance before the incident happens – in fact most places around the world require automobile insurance. Similarly with many organizations, any production-use technology might be mandated to have its own insurance in the way of 24/7 support.
I think however this is a very one-sided view that does not capture the full value (and ROI) that a MySQL Support contract with Percona provides. Let’s look at the different dimensions of value it provides based on the different support cases we have received throughout the years.
Reduce and Prevent Downtime
If your database goes down, the time to recover will be significantly shorter with a support agreement than without it. Cost of downtime varies widely between organizations. Gartner estimates the average cost of downtime is $5,000 per minute.
With most of our clients, we have found that the cost of preventing or rapidly reducing even one significant downtime event a year more than pays for the cost of support. Even when the client’s in-house team is very experienced, our help is often invaluable as we are exposed to a great variety of incidents from hundreds of companies, so it is much more likely we have encountered the same incident before and have a solution ready. Helping to recover from downtime quickly is a reactive part of support – you can realize even more value by proactively working with support to get advice on your HA options as well as ensure that you’re following the best database backup and security practices.
Better Security
Having a MySQL Support contract by itself is not enough to prevent all security incidents. MySQL will be only one of the components for a possible attack vector and it takes a lot of everyday work to stay secure. There is nothing that can guarantee complete security. MySQL Support, however, can be an invaluable resource for your security team to learn how to apply security and compliance practices to your MySQL environment and how to avoid typical mistakes.
The cost of data breaches can be phenomenal and also impact business reputations much more than downtime or performance issues. Depending on the company size and market, costs will vary. Different studies estimate costs ranging in average from $640K in direct costs to $3.5M. What everyone seems to agree upon is that security risks and security costs are on the rise and you can’t afford to leave this areas unchecked.
Fix Database Software Bugs
While you might have great DBAs on your team who are comfortable with best practices and downtime recovery, most likely you do not have a development team comfortable with fixing bugs in the database kernel or supporting tools. Being able get software fixes contributes to downtime reduction as well as all kinds of other things, such as ensuring efficient development and operation teams, avoiding using complex workarounds, etc.
Reduce Resources
A large number of questions we get are performance-related which, when addressed, provide a better experience for users, saves costs, and minimizes environmental impact by using less resources.
Savings vary depending on your application scale and how much it is already optimized. In the best cases, our support team has helped customers make applications more than 10x more efficient. In most cases though, we are able to help make things at least 30% more efficient. If you’re spending $100K or more on your database environment, this benefit alone will make a support agreement well worth it.
Efficient Developers
This is important one. Way too often customers do not even give their developers access to support, even though these developers are critical in realizing the the full value of their application. Developers working with databases make many decisions about schema design, query writing, and the use of MySQL features such as stored procedures, triggers or foreign keys. Without a MySQL Support contract, developers often have resort to “Google” to find an answer – and often end up with inapplicable, outdated or simply wrong information. Combined with this, they often apply or resort to time-consuming trial and error.
With help of the Percona Support team, developers can learn the proven practices that apply to their specific situation, save a lot of time and get a better application to the market faster. Even with a single US-based developer intensively working with MySQL, a support agreement might be well worth the cost based on increased developer efficiency alone. Larger development teams simply cannot afford to not have support.
Efficient Operations
Your operations staff (DBAs, DevOps, Sysadmins) are in the same boat – if your database environment is significant, chances are you are always looking for ways to save time, make operations more efficient and reduce mistakes. Our Support team can provide you with specific actionable advice for the challenges you’re experiencing.
Chances are we have seen environments similar to yours and know which software, approaches and practices work well and which do not. This all of course contributes to downtime prevention and reduction, but also helps with team efficiency. With the Percona Support team’s help, you will be able to handle operations with a smaller team or be able to have stuff done with less experienced staff members.
Better Applications
Percona Support access helps developers not only be more productive, but also results in better application quality because best practices in application database interface design, schema, queries, etc. are followed. The Percona team has supported many applications for many years, so we often will think about problems before you might think about them, such as:
- “How will this design play with replication or sharding?”
- “Will it scale with large amounts of users or data?”
- “How flexible is such a design when the application will inevitably be evolving over years?”
While a better application is hard to quantify, it really is quite important.
Faster Time to Market
Yet another benefit that comes from developers having access to a MySQL Support team is faster time to market. For many agile applications, being able to launch new features faster is even more important than cost savings – this is how businesses can succeed against the competition. At Percona, we love helping businesses succeed.
As you see, there are a lot of ways Percona Support can contribute to the success of your business. Support is much more than “insurance” that you should consider purchasing for compliance reasons. If you’re using MySQL for your applications, Percona Support will provide a great return on investment, allowing you to minimize risks and costs while delivering the highest quality of application or service possible.
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