MySQL Features
We have already mentioned multithreading as a key feature to support MySQL’s performance design goals. It is the core feature around which MySQL is built. Other features include:
- Openness
MySQL is open in every sense of the term. Its SQL dialect uses ANSI SQL2 as its foundation. The database engine runs on countless platforms, including Windows 2000, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. If no binary is available for your platform, you have access to the source to compile to that platform.
- Application support
MySQL has an API for just about any programming language. Specifically, you can write database applications that access MySQL in C, C++, Eiffel, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Tcl. In this book, we cover C, Java, Python, Perl, and PHP.
- Cross-database joins
You can construct MySQL queries that can join tables from different databases.
- Outer join support
MySQL supports both left and right outer joins using both ANSI and ODBC syntax.
- Internationalization
MySQL supports several different character sets, including ISO-8859-1, Big5, and Shift-JIS. It also supports sorting for different character sets and can be customized easily. Error messages can be provided in different languages as well.
Above all else, MySQL is cheap and fast. Other features of MySQL may attract you, but cost and performance are its greatest benefits. The other relational databases fall into two categories:
Low-cost database engines such as mSQL, PostgreSQL, and InstantDB
Commercial vendors such as ...
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