Blog: Pete Loshin: A MySQL Win, Or Is It?

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A MySQL Win, Or Is It?

Software companies may (or may not) spend lots of money on advertising in the trade press, but they live or die but what the editorial content says about their products. So this review, Road Test: Four Databases Tested, published in the Australian website Builder AU must have been very good news for MySQL AB. Because they were awarded an "Editor's Choice" on the strength of its list of advanced features along with strong performance in ease of use and GUI administration.

"Testing" is a rather strong word for the kind of comparo review presented here: there was no benchmarking or other more formalized activities typically associated with software testing. What the editors did, as I have done more than once for publications as august as BYTE Magazine, PC World and PC Magazine, was to select the leading products in a category, choose criteria other than mere performance, usually focusing on things like feature checklists, user interface, support and ease of use, and then rate them.

This gives some basis for comparison among the products, but without forcing the editors to shell out what would be serious money to pay for highly-skilled testers to do more rigorous testing.

The products chosen in this case included MySQL, Microsoft's SQL Server Express Edition (Beta2), Oracle's 10g Standard Edition, and IBM's DB2 Express; does it mean that MySQL is the best product for every database application? Of course not. But it's an interesting read and certainly a valuable resource if you need to compare features.

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