The Uppsala, Sweden-based company’s MySQL database has enjoyed some success among developers and is improving the chances of its being deployed in production environments with advanced querying capabilities and new configuration tools, among other things.
MySQL has some strong competition in the database server space from Oracle Corp, IBM Corp, and Microsoft Corp, but research from Evans Data Corp earlier this year indicated that sales of MySQL to developers grew by more than 30% last year.
Despite that, research firm Aberdeen Group earlier dismissed open source databases such as MySQL, and also PostgreSQL, and Berkeley DB as all dressed up [and] nowhere to go.
MySQL is attempting to change that image both with version 4.1 and the forthcoming 5.0, which entered Alpha testing earlier this year. Version 5.0 will feature stored procedures support, facilitating the adoption of MySQL for existing legacy database applications.
Version 4.1 lays the foundation for 5.0 with support for subqueries and derived tables to enable users to search complex data sets, a new client/server protocol with support for prepared statements for optimized query executive, and a new GUI installer and configuration wizards for Linux and Windows.
The new version also offers encrypted client/server communication using OpenSSL to protect against malicious intrusion and unauthorized access, and a smaller memory footprint for the MySQL server library to improve performance in embedded systems, among other things.
The product is available now for Linux and Windows, as well as various versions of Unix under both open source or commercial licenses. The commercially licensed version costs from $595 per server.
