• Nice intro. My company is evaluating MySQL with a variety of expectations depending on with whom you speak. We are primarly MS SQL and Oracle off-host ( non-DB2 ). The core DB group has little experience in the Open Source arena but are looking to remedy that shortly. While I agree MySQL definitely has a place (cost, especially when looking at Oracle...yeeesh) and fits in, I'm a stodgy "old-timer" trying to redeem myself from my propreitary db ways. My initial research raises concerns, particularly the supportability of MySQL in large enterprise environments regarding:

    - Environments with high concurrency demands, not just reads but high transactional volume. I'm under the impression this could be ugly.

    - Lack of good backup technology. Having to lock all my tables to get a file level backup reduces availability somewhat unless you get fancy with your volume managers.

    - Enterprise level security. Sometimes regulatory requirements impose requirements in this regard. For example, audit capabilities (DCL, DML, DDL, Logins etc ), account configuration ( password complexity, ability to lock accounts after x bad logins or at all! etc ). These features seem lacking in MySQL that were at least somewhat addressed in MS SQL 2005.

    - Operational support/performance tuning aids. Oracle has the wait interface, tracing, ASH etc. MS SQL has profile among other features. What does MYSQL have....crickets. If I have a poor performing process what would I use? Instance wide stats are not going to cut it at that level. However, perhaps I've not gotten to that level in my researching yet....

    - Vendor support...okay, this is the bigot in me. I know this can be purchased from Novell, Sun...etc. It would be interesting to know how this check box has been addressed by others. When a system is down...its nice to call somebody and get a quick answer rather than some forum with sometime dubious answers.

    I agree I'd love to hear more about your experiences with these topics. Explaining additional comments like Innodb being a scaled down version of MySQL. Do you mean performance or in terms of robustness of functionality? etc.

    Thanks