I have written here before on the development history of MySQL, and indeed, my current employ uses it, with much pain. Don't get me wrong: I love that there are other ideas and competition in the DBMS space. However, for anyone to think MySQL is at this time a comparable platform to MS SQL Server or Oracle, has not done their homework, or is just flat out biased and/or without real knowlege of the other systems.

One must understand that MySQL is a "plugin" architecture, where the SQL service engine is a layer over potentially many different types of engines (15+ types). This is a feature and a bug. Only one of these engines was advertised as ACID compliant (INNODB), and MySQL did not even own that engine. This is what chokes progress on that platform. In my opinion, Sun is using it more to sell more servers, not databases... and give the market another big reason to buy their hardware.

They do have a market... primarily the anti-MS crowd.