I remember the day I got "the" call. It was in January, 2001 and I was working as a part of an engineering team developing an online, web-based customer billing system for Louisville Gas & Electric. The app was being developed using VB.net on a Windows DNA (distributed network app) architecture that would eventually be served up under IIS. Cutting edge stuff for the day, ancient by today's standards. The call came from my current boss, Robin Schumacher, who wanted me to join him in something call "Product Management" with Embarcadero Technologies. Overall the move has been a good one, but to be completely honest, I miss getting elbows deep in technical details. Along the way, I have had the opportunity to work with some of the best database management tools on the market. I was fortunate to manage Embarcadero's flagship Rapid SQL and DBArtisan products during my 4+ year tenure and had the great privilege of working with one of the highest performing engineering teams in the ISV business.
Robin left Embarcadero to start the Product Management group at MySQL in June, 2005. He recruited me again and I joined him in December of 2005 to manage what was then call MySQL Network. Having worked primarily for corporate IT shops and commercial software companies, it was quite an adjustment coming to work for MySQL. Front and center, the primary product is open source and free to use; hard to swallow for the capitalist in me, but hey I quickly adapted. Actually, I prefer the MySQL model to the old school, licensed, proprietary model. Basically, you use our product to build great apps and when those apps become critical to your business, you pay us to help you make sure they are up and running great. Win-win!
At MySQL I work with some of the best and brightest Engineering and business minds in the industry. My primary partnership is with the Enterprise Tools Engineering team led by Gary Whizin and Mark Matthews. Our primary work is focused on the MySQL Enterprise Monitor which comes as part of a MySQL Enterprise subscription. MySQL Enterprise is our subscription based solution that includes the Enterprise Server and regular bug fixes, the Enterprise Monitor and Expert Advisors and our stellar Production Support Services. You can learn more here. We (PM and the Enterprise Tools team) release new versions of the Monitor 2-3 times a year to ensure that the product continues to evolve. Along these lines we are currently working on Enterprise Monitor 2.0 that will ship with advanced Query collection and analysis capabilities. Of all the product releases I have been involved with since jumping from development to Product Management, this one has me the most excited. It might be because we are addressing a common DBA/Developer pain point with a very real, easy to use solution. It might be because every single customer we have spoken to echoes this pain. It might be those things, but I think I am most excited because some of the proprietary tool vendors in the MySQL monitoring space have creatively adopted our very public facing roadmap and announced similar features in their products. I think this is great! We want them to be successful and to enable more people to adopt and deploy MySQL as part of their move to innovative Web 2.0 technologies. IMHO this is a win all the way around!
I will post more details on the new beta release of the Enterprise Monitor with the new Query Analyzer in my upcoming posts. It is mighty cool!
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