>Performance wise I think it is wonderful, especially if you have an SMP kernel on multi-processor machine running. It takes a bit to get used to it's permission style. All permissions are stored in tables. You can assign permissions based on hosts, login, table, action, just about anything you can think of. But because it does that instead of flat files, it is quicker. There is also a console app to connect and execute commands on the database or table directly. You can write scripts that automatically do maitenance or whatever you would like, export tables in SQL format so that they can be imported by any system that will read a SQL file. All sorts of good stuff.
>Where it lacks... Transactions. So far, transactions haven't been implemented. So if a user screws something up, you can go back to a backup, but you can read the days log of transactions and commit all of them up to a certain point UNLESS you write you own logging program that intercepts the commands, sends them to a file and then to MySQL.
>But hey, it's fast, it's free, it's supported.
>
>j

Jason,

Have you ever tried PostgreSQL? I think it has a larger feature set (including transactions). There are also drivers for various languages/platforms. I only played with it & php for a couple of weeks (about a year ago), but I know a SQL guy who swears by it.