MySQL: the Australian connection

Sam Varghese
Monday, 19 May 2008 23:33

Opinion and Analysis

The option of working for other companies was considered, then dropped. "Companies like Google, for instance, are really interesting, but at the very least you have to move to Sydney, and in my case, I probably would have had to go to Mountain View to be involved in the things I would have wanted to be involved in. And in the case of Google, in particular, they use lots of open source, but they're not very open. Internally they're open, so you can talk about it to your colleagues, but externally you're not allowed to talk about anything you're doing. I've noticed that with some friends who work at Google - they can't talk about what they're doing," he says.

"I've become so used to both talking about what I'm working on, and just exchanging ideas with people, and getting extra ideas from that discussion that I decided probably this is not the company I would work for even though it's an excellent company and business as well. This is an example of something I really contemplated and considered, and so I started for myself again. I've done that before in the Netherlands when I was a stupid youngster. Made some money and  spent lots of money - probably more than I earned. So I thought, heck, why not try this again?"

And so Open Query was born. Lentz says the company focuses on training and consulting for MySQL and PostgreSQL in Australia and New Zealand. "We now have 10 day-modules for MySQL (scheduled in sets of 3 days) across 5 cities in the coming months. Recent days in Melbourne were fully booked, proving the popularity of the formula and content. There are also several PostgreSQL training days scheduled. There's growing demand for custom (in-house courses) for MySQL in particular. This makes me very pleased, since Open Query only started in September last year, yet we're profitable and growing. It's also a great endorsement for the use of OSS database technology in this region. And, in fact, it makes Open Query the premier training source for MySQL skills in ANZ, even before Sun/MySQL."

He keeps good relations with the company whose name he was synonymous with for some years. But he doesn't see any possibility of being involved with MySQL in any role. "I could be a consulting partner; I can't be a training partner at the moment because I develop my own training material and i'm kind of like a competitor.

"Whatever type of partner I become, part of any agreement would be that I have to promote MySQL Enterprise and the enterprise offering and pretty much not discuss MySQL community edition and I wouldn't sign that. When I'm wearing my Open Query hat, people often ask me about MySQL community edition and I need to have the freedom to talk about it; I don't like to be obliged to plug something and not talk about something else.

"The same would apply to any other product. I've talked to other companies about doing things with their technologies, various high-availability technologies, but I don't want to be a reseller for the product, I want to let clients evaluate a range of products and help them in anything they select, I don't want to be bound by an agreement. The MySQL partnership doesn't suit my kind of business."