MySQL

Again in the Good/Bad/summary format.

The Good:
MySQL is a nice light-weight RDBMS which took the light-weight content management/data-driven web site by storm in the late 1990's. It is extremely fast for simple non-transactional workloads (as one would expect from a data-driven web stie) and has a number of cool application-development features which are generally beyond the scope of an RDBMS (such as HEAP tables which are not ACID compliant).

The Bad:
MySQL does not offer good performance on well-normalized datasets with many joins (it uses a simple planner which is less able to handle more complex planning problems). Furthermore, the data integrity features of MySQL can generally be turned off by applications so they cannot be relied upon.

Also, under certain circumstnaces, MySQL will silently ignore valid ISO SQL primary/foreign key designations, or create tables with non-ACID-compliant types.

Summary:
I gave this product a 3 out of five because it does not handle traditional RDBMS tasks well, but offers developers a number of options in creating light-weight applications which do not rely on these features too much.

MYSQL is a good choice for many types of database workloads and is compatible with many popular open source content management systems.

Its free and good quality. I use it for self-study needs. This is my first choice for open source project back-end.

Lightweight and robust !!!