MySQL Database Server

Many commercial databases: Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL server, ...
We will use MySQL (www.mysql.com).
Its main advantages are:
- It's simple
- It's fast
- It's freely available (Open Source)
Thus, it is ideal for building database backed web-applications!
What MySQL does not provide:
- Sub-selects. Query must be rewritten using joins or use temporary tables.
- Stored procedures and triggers
- Transactions. Use table-locking instead (more on this later).
- Record-level locking
- Views
- ...