If you need support, there's nothing wrong with buying support, even quite expensive support. I'm sure Oracle would have provided the some of best MySQL support available.
But yes, it's good to have the option of doing it yourself :-D
(For our few services that run on MySQL, I'm really hanging out for MariaDB to make it into Debian and hence Ubuntu, which is what we run on live - a mix of 12.04 and 14.04. Oracle runs on our last two remaining Sun Niagara SPARC boxes. We will be killing our last Oracle this year.)
But yes, it's good to have the option of doing it yourself :-D
(For our few services that run on MySQL, I'm really hanging out for MariaDB to make it into Debian and hence Ubuntu, which is what we run on live - a mix of 12.04 and 14.04. Oracle runs on our last two remaining Sun Niagara SPARC boxes. We will be killing our last Oracle this year.)