Relation Databases Are the Standard of the Day

But for implementing a relational database from one of the industry standard companies like Oracle or Microsoft, it becomes a costly affair. Thus to eradicate this problem, there are many companies which offer free RDBMS packages. Some of these packages are MySQL and PostgreSQL

These packages provide a very solid relational database system with almost the same set of features as the big ones but the main difference comes in performance and scalability. Any free software is normally started by enthusiasts and hobbyists. After a considerable amount of development, when the product becomes robust, community accepts it and makes it their choice. There are many successes in free software world like Linux, Sendmail, Perl, Apache and so on. MySQL is a similar system which is gaining influence in the community day by day, actually for some applications; it is rated as the best performer in terms of speed and reliability. In this section I am going to discuss a few aspects of performance related issues with free packages like MySQL and discuss Pros and Cons

(a) For:

As mentioned earlier, MySQL is gaining industry fame day by day. Many big organizations are using MySQL. This makes it a bigger task for the developers and administrators of this software to make it more responsive, reliable and increase the performance. The developers have stood up to this task by providing various facilities that will enhance the performance. The following are notable thing that are done by developers of MySQL that makes it a better tool to work with:

. MySQL provides various table types which may enhance the performance. All the user has to do is select the exact table type that fits his application.

. Recently MySQL provided a thread library change in OpenBSD 3.0 to boost the performance and with introduction of BSD 5.0, it becomes even faster.

. They provide large number of tools and wizards to measure and tune the performance.

. A better way of doing Index merge: To satisfy an OR clause, MySQL is now able to create query plans that use multiple indexes.

. The ability to save server side procedures makes the clients faster as they remove a huge work load from clients.

. The views provided by MySQL give huge advantage to the administrators and makes their task easier by providing features like ability to define relationships among multiple tables, ability to specify filter criteria and many others.

. Better tuning by settings like optimizer_prune_level and optimizer_search_depth.

. Server side cursors lets you define structures or objects to hold retrieved information, some think like cache. This added to the stored procedure concept, makes the performance of the application way too better.

. There are many triggers in Version 5.0.2 of MySQL which will start activities on the server and thus makes the job of developers easier.

. Many features to report the workload on the server and the client.

. These are just new features added into the MySQL version 5.0, thus showing the development being done on MySQL to make it better. Apart from these existing features and functions that will enhance the performance, many free workshops are conducted for betterment of performance or