This section provides a quick introduction of MySQL 4.0 with a list of main features.
MySQL - An open source database management system developed by MySQL AB,
http://www.mysql.com. MySQL was started with mSQL with fast low-level (ISAM) routines.
So MySQL and mSQL are having almost the same application programming interfaces and
command line interfaces.
Main features of MySQL 4.0 (extracted from MySQL manual):
Works on many different platforms.
APIs for C, C++, Eiffel, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl are available.
Fully multi-threaded using kernel threads.
Provides transactional and non-transactional storage engines.
Uses very fast B-tree disk tables (MyISAM) with index compression.
Very fast joins using an optimized one-sweep multi-join.
SQL functions are implemented using a highly optimized class library and
should be as fast as possible.
Support for aliases on tables and columns as required by SQL-92.
Handles large databases. We use MySQL Server with databases that contain 50 million records.
We also know of users that use MySQL Server with 60,000 tables and about 5,000,000,000 rows.
Clients may connect to the MySQL server using TCP/IP sockets on any platform.
The Connector/ODBC interface provides MySQL support for client programs that use ODBC (Open-DataBase-Connectivity) connections.
The Connector/JDBC interface provides MySQL support for Java client programs that use JDBC connections.