Originally Posted by GMMorris Actually Oracle is free- it's support costs money.

From: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/index.html

All software downloads are free, and each comes with a development license that allows you to use full versions of the products only while developing and prototyping your applications.

MySql is a lot more robust than I think you guys are giving it credit. We run MySQL and process about 8 gb of data running, on average, a little more than one million queries each day. Right now our average is 710.19 queries per minute and we are running fine. We expect to be able to handle about 20,000+ per minute before we need to upgrade our db server or possibly move up to Oracle.

From the testing we did when we we first set our site up MSSQL performed the worst out of the DB servers we tested. But the performance wasn't because of MSSQL. From what we could tell it had more to do with Windows Server.

MySQL performed the best and thats why we used it.

PostgreSQL was just slightly slower than MySQL.

We did not test Oracle because of it operating cost. It is likely to be our database server of choice in the future though, as we begin to expand even further.

I think that the largest reasons that MSSQL is even semi-popular is simply because all of these college students get tought to use MS products in school and the only thing that they learn is MS this and MS that. I would wager a guess that 25-50% of all companies that are using MSSQL didn't even try to perform load tests when selecting a Database Server, but selected it because the new database administrator at that time said that they should use it (in reality only saying that because it is the only database software that he/she knows about).