Tag Archives: My Oracle Support

MySQL Support is Hiring!

My old team here at Oracle looking for talented, experienced MySQL experts to join the amazing MySQL Support Team.  I was lucky enough to join this great group of people over seven years ago, and while my responsibilities have shifted to other areas with the MySQL team at Oracle, I still join the team’s chat channel daily (where they’ve revoked my vowel and address me as “t*dd” to highlight my treachery in leaving the team).   I don’t know that it’s possible to find a better group of colleagues to work with than can be found in the MySQL Support Team.

The work itself is exciting – if you like solving problems, this is an incredible job.  I’m not talking about finding and quoting applicable sections of the MySQL reference manual.  I’m talking about owning customer problems like they are your own, taking the time to understand what’s really needed, and investing the (sometimes considerable) energy into finding adequate solutions for customers – whether the problem be a bug, optimizing a schema or a query, making deployment or architecture recommendations, or just pointing people to the right download for their needs.

Beyond the primary responsibility of caring for customers in need, the MySQL Support Team performs a number of other critical roles in Oracle.  They process and prioritize community-reported bugs, they wrote many of the questions on the updated MySQL 5.6 certification exams, they evaluate development releases and provide early feedback on pre-GA software, they share their knowledge at conferences, they contribute code patches, they write features that meet customer needs, they participate in product planning teams.  If you want to have a meaningful, lasting influence on MySQL products and community, this is a great opportunity.

The team is particularly looking for candidates in Japan, Russia, India, China, Mexico, Portugal or the U.S., but would love to see resumes of qualified individuals elsewhere.  If you’re interested, please let me know via the private contact form below:

My Oracle Support 6.5: Key new features

If you are a MySQL support customer, the recent release of My Oracle Support (MOS) 6.5 has some features which may interest you (if you’re not a customer, this post likely won’t interest you). MOS 6.5 was introduced on 06 April, and with it came the ability to opt in to receive service request (SR) update details via email. This was a feature some MySQL Support customers missed after the migration to MOS. Thanks to feedback from MySQL Support customers and others with similar needs, this feature has now been implemented. Because email is an inherently insecure delivery mechanism, not all customers will wan this, and the feature requires customers to explicitly opt in before SR update content is sent via email.  Coupled with the MOS Mobile interface, Support customers have a number of flexible ways to access and manage SRs.

The second major enhancement is the ability to participate in live chat with support staff via MOS. You can set your availability flag in MOS, and a support engineer can see your status to initiate a chat, if needed. For me, chats are better than emails when interaction is more “conversational”, and better than phone calls when specific instructions or diagnostic information needs to be shared.

If either of these new features interest you, Chris Warticki’s blog post or the actual release notes for MOS 6.5 are good references for more information.

Thanks again to MySQL Support customers who advocated for these features – Oracle is listening, and your efforts improve the support experience for all Oracle support customers.