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SQL Server opens the doors to the largest customer base in the planet, provides support to grow your business and provides free and compact solutions but also enables growing the applications and services to the largest and most demanding enterprise customers. Embed SQL Server Express and the tiny SQL Compact at zero cost, even in commercial applications.
Supporting SQL Server opens the doors to more customers than any other database in the planet – IDC shows that SQL Server sells more databases than Oracle and IBM combined, and is actively being used by 75% of all large companies.
Build application with SQL Server Express -- free to develop and free to deploy, then add features beyond anything MySQL has, with no code changes: deploy web sites with no database size or memory limit through low cost SQL Server Web, extend with Reporting and Analysis via SQL Server Standard, and grow to mission critical with SQL Server Enterprise -- with advanced capabilities like Transparent Encryption & Compression. MySQL only has one edition, and cannot grow to include most of the additional capabilities available in SQL Server paid editions.
SQL Server has been proven for the most demanding applications in the planet, through benchmarks like SAP Sales & Distribution (93,000 concurrent users: 10x largest customer in the planet), the #1 price/performance 10TB TPC-H benchmark, and production Data Warehouses of more than 400TB. MySQL has no industry standard benchmarks and can currently address only 4 CPUs/cores vs 256 for SQL Server. SQL Server provides scale out, scale up, failover technologies, disaster recovery, parallel online operations, and many other capabilities required for large complex deployments.
Include geospatial data and maps capabilities in applications, embed reporting, extend solutions through industry standard high speed native XML. MySQL provides none of these capabilities. The tight integration with Visual Studio enables developing database enabled solutions with one of the most advanced development and debugging tools available today.
For smaller form factors, choose the Free SQL Compact edition for embeddable applications – a very compact 1.8MB download even includes sync capabilities. SQL Compact has no cost, even if the application is sold commercially. MySQL requires royalties when embedding MySQL, and the smallest MySQL Windows download available in MySQL website is +35 MB.
SQL Server provides opportunities for additional revenue, through reselling SQL Server as part of the application through the Royalty program, and becoming a partner of Microsoft can bring additional opportunities, including lower cost software to develop, and even comarketing in some cases. The Microsoft development tools reduce development and support cost through world class development and debugging tools.
SQL Server has more than 1,000 developers improving the product, with continuous releases, predictable code updates, and a proven record for supporting and extending the free solutions, starting with MSDE up to today with SQL Server Express 2008. MySQL founder has shared his concerns with “crashing bugs” even in the current version of MySQL. MySQL can take more than six months to fix even serious bugs, key engineers and founders are leaving the company, and the future is uncertain after being acquired by Sun and a year later by Oracle.
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MySQL
