SQL Server or mySQL?

Right, once you get into large million-dollar+ companies, they won't use the free stuff because of its lack of polish as a corporate solution such as Oracle. I believe the going rate for Oracle software is in the $20,000 range. Oracle is something like 100x faster than MySQL. When you are dealing with corporate web sites that are doing 100s of queries a minute, the server has to be able to handle the load. MySQL starts to degrade, and fail.

Actually Oracle is free- it's support costs money.

I'm with GMMorris on this one. Yes, MySql is free and there are a lot of web apps that use it, but most corporate environments don't use it from what I've seen. Even if they want a free database, I would take PostrgeSQL over MySql b/c of the abiity to do inner selects among other things.

Is your server Windows or Linux based? Are you programming in PHP or something else (asp?).

If you are using PHP, go the MySQL route. It's easier to coordinate with PHP (considering PHP has built in funtions for MySQL). If you are programming in ASP, use MS SQL Server.

That basically sums it up for you. If you are just doing small projects, MySQL is definately the way to go.

Originally Posted by GMMorris thats just not true... I work with huge companies and none of them trust MySQL enough. They all use SQLServer or Oracle... I'm talking HP, Comverse, Militery etc.

completely agre, oracle is far more powerful than mysql will ever be

the only reason everyone uses mysql is because its incredibly simple

Just to some up thing the way I see it:
1)I Love MySQL. It has served me well for years, but it's power is very limited and should be used only for relatively small applications (even VBulletin could be considered stretching it abit. Heavy traffic VBulletins like WHT suffer from time to time). BTW I recently did my company's review of MySQL 5 (since I'm an avid OpenSource developer my company often sends me to do the review of Open Source products) and let me tell you- its great. It handled Stored procedures and Inner Queries very well. There were afew screw ups, but it is still in Beta and works nicely.

2)For larger applications I would suggest Oracle (Not SQLServer), because it is much more powerful. Admitedly it can be overkill sometimes. Oracle server eat ALOT of memory, but if your looking for a well paying job your much better off learning Oracle rather than SQLServer, because it is muly platform, and has excelent support.

Good luck

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).

Originally Posted by UrlTrends 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.

True, but when you develop an application for a large company THEY pay for that. For learning and developing the software its free. Thats what I was refering to.

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.

Just out of interest - how powerful is your server? It would probably need some big guns for that amout of processing, no?

Personally, I like MySQL. It's up to you.

Originally Posted by UrlTrends From: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/index.html 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.

Your site is using a dedicated server though, correct? Most sites are using MySQL for small personal sites on virtual or shared servers. So, MySQL isn't going to seem all that fast at times.