Great comments as usual. I really like Open Source projects and often recommend them to clients, with the caveats that they need to be mature and active. Don’t be the first or last to use an open source project. At the top of our most recommended open source is MySQL, one reason being that it helps force teams to scale through architecture and not rely on special features.

Everyday I’m becoming a bigger fan of the clouds but I’m not ready to rely soley on them to scale a significant volume. Even with the introduction of Amazon’s RDS, I think you need to take the ability to scale your DB in your own hands.

What do you think?

I wonder what do you think about Open Source projects (like MySql) as “vendors”.

also, for those counting about cloud services for scalability… what then?