Wednesday, February 08, 2006

MySQL products CD/DVD?

Ronald Bradford's article about Testing/Trialing new MySQL Releases (an excellent idea!) made me think of another idea which could help MySQL to promote its products.

There are still many people without fast speed access to the internet to download files with many MBs of size. And there might be many people who would be interested in testing MySQL, but they would still need a little impulse to really get into it.

So my idea would be to sell CDs, or even better DVDs with all the free products around MySQL - maybe at net costs. This could include (for all common platforms)

* the current GA releases of MySQL server
* the current development releases of MySQL
* the client tools like QueryBrowser, Administrator, MigrationToolkit, etc.
* all the API drivers like JDBC, .NET, PHP etc.
* the current MaxDB release
* free 3rd party tools (like phpMyAdmin, Apache, PHP, ...)
* the manuals
* tutorials
* training videos (speeches at Conferences, ...)
* newsletters
* maybe even a 'best of' from blog articles

and so on (to keep it short - everything around MySQL that's available for free).

This CD/DVD could be renewed for example every six months. Maybe it would even be possible to attach it to Computer Magazines or give free copies to big companies, where people could redistribute their copy and get some of their employees in tough with MySQL (which would not only be a deal for the IT departments, but also for other office clerks who still abuse Excel as a database - maybe special tutorials could be tailored especially for this target group ;-)). There would be a lot of great opportunities, I think!

Even I - although I'm one of the guys who keeps his MySQL products much more up-to-date than on a half-a-year basis - would seriously consider buying this CD/DVD to have everything packed up together nicely.

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