hey bytehd, I did a benchmark earlier this month for one of the microsoft newsgroups. While it is not the best benchmark for a number of reasons mainly because of the very simple query, it gives you an idea of the differences of mysql and mssql. You can also find a MSSQL,MySQL,Oracle,Access benchmark http://www.sloppycode.net/benchmark/

Here is my benchmark

System:

P4 1.4ghz

128 RAM

SQL Server Ent. Eval.

MySQL v3.23.55

Database: Test

Table: Temp

Column: Col001 char(32) NOT NULL

No Indexes on either

DB Size (MSSQL)

4 Million records

334 MB after shrink

DB Size (MySQL)

8 million records

251 MB

MySQL

Query = SELECT COUNT(*) FROM TEMP

Command Line = 0.18 sec

ODBC Connection w/ASP = 3.0 sec

*Note* The 3 seconds was only the first query, after that the time was less

than a second

MS SQL

Query = SELECT COUNT(*) FROM TEMP

Query Analyzer = 10.0 sec (after 2 previous queries, first was 13 sec)

OLEDB Connection w/ASP = 13.0 sec

My Benchmark, unfortunately I did not record the time it took to load the

records into the database, but the load time for sql server was about 4

times slower. The records were created by using a for loop to make a list

of 100,000 numbers hashed with the md5 algorithm, so 100,000 32 character

strings. They were then loaded into each database server from the text file

by using the importing features that come with each database server. Each

query was run 3 times to eliminate some lag. When run in asp time difference

was determined only by using Now() not by using a timer function so time is

only expressed in whole seconds for asp, not 10ths or 100ths of a second.

Both database servers were fresh installs installed just to test this so no

tuning was done to either which also makes the times a little slower.