Thanks for the article, Ken, very informative. It wasn't what I was expecting, I was expecting more of a command-level or operational level rather than storage engine level. Still, good information. I've always wondered what difference the storage engine made, and now I know.

I've tried to get MySQL working on my various platforms but always had problems, it was a couple of generations ago and hopefully they've made substantial improvements to their installers. In the books that I've read I was impressed by how close their syntax is to T-SQL and ANSI, it made me feel that the learning curve from a syntactic standpoint wouldn't be too great. One thing that I thought was really cool was the backup scripting out the table structure in addition to making the data a series of insert statements.

Currently I have it pre-installed on my web sites (on RHE) as a standard package supporting and supported by Fantastico, running a few Small Machines Forum message boards, a chat engine, and now my WordPress blog. I quite like the power and stability, and the PHP admin interface works well, though it takes a little getting used to.

To add my $0.002 worth to suggestions for future articles, how about an installation walk-through? I know I could find plenty online, but it would be nice to see one from someone that we know, so to speak. I'd also like to see an article illustrating how to do stored procedures in MySQL.

Not that there's any pressure for you to write more articles for us here.... :hehe: