MySQL on Windows WWH final - · PDF fileMySQL also provides visual database design, development, administration and ... Server, the database on which their Web application was then

MySQL on Windows – Why, Where and How?

A MySQL Strategy Whitepaper November 2010

Copyright©2010,Oracleand/oritsaffiliates.Allrightsreserved.

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Table of Content

Introduction ....................................................................................................3 1. MySQL on Windows – Why? .....................................................................3

1.1 Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)................................................3 1.2 Broad Platform Support:......................................................................5 1.3 Reliability...............................................................................................6 1.4 Performance and Scalability: ..............................................................6 1.5 Ease of Use and Administration: ........................................................7 1.6 Integration into the Windows Environment .......................................7

2. MySQL on Windows – Where?..................................................................8 2.1 Web-Based Applications......................................................................8 2.2 Custom Enterprise Applications .......................................................10 2.3 Embedded Applications.....................................................................11

3. MySQL on Windows – How?...................................................................13 3.1 MySQL Enterprise Edition: ................................................................14 3.2 MySQL High Availability Solutions ...................................................18

Conclusion....................................................................................................20 Additional Resources ..................................................................................20


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Introduction

While MySQL is famously known as the “M” of the popular LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python), Microsoft Windows consistently ranks as the #1 development platform for MySQL users in our surveys. As a matter of fact, Windows now also ranks higher than any Linux distribution as a deployment platform among the MySQL Community Edition users. Why is the world’s most popular open source database so popular on Windows? What are the applications for which one should consider MySQL on Microsoft’s platform? How should Windows shops relying on Microsoft databases get going with MySQL? Those are the questions we aim to answer in this guide “MySQL on Windows – Why, Where and How”.

1. MySQL on Windows – Why?

Overall, the popularity of MySQL on Microsoft Windows can be attributed to the following attributes:

• Lower Total Cost of Ownership • Broad platform support • Ease of use and administration • Reliability • Performance and scalability • Integration into the Windows environment

Let’s now consider each point: 1.1 Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

In MySQL’s annual surveys, lower cost is consistently shown to be the number one reason why users choose MySQL. Below is a chart comparing the 3 year TCO of MySQL Enterprise Editon vs. Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition.


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- Term: 3 Years - Users: Unlimited (web) - Servers: 4 - CPUs/Server: 4 - Hardware: Intel x86 - MySQL: MySQL Enterprise Edition - Microsoft: SQL Server Enterprise Edition


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Microsoft SQL Server vs. MySQL: 3 Year Database TCO

The table below presents a simple comparison of licensing costs between MySQL Enterprise and Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition. Pricing is based on publicly available list price information:

Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx

MySQL Enterprise Edition: http://www.mysql.com/products/

Hardware Configuration:

- Web application (Unlimited Users) - Windows - Intel x86 - Servers: 4 - CPUs/Server: 4 - Cores/CPU: 4

Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition

License + 3 Year Support

MySQL Enterprise Edition

3 Year Subscription

License List Price $27,495/CPU N/A

Support List Price 25% of List Price N/A

Subscription List Price N/A $5,000/Server/Year

Total License $439,920 N/A

Total Support (3 Years) $329,940 N/A

Total Subscription (3 Years)

$60,000

Total (3 Years)

$769,860 $60,000

Total Savings ($) $709,860

Total Savings (%) 92%

1.2 Broad Platform Support:

Unlike Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL supports over 20 operating systems and platform combinations including Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Solaris, HP-UX and many more. MySQL users are not locked-in to a single operating system or platform and have the flexibility to deploy MySQL in a heterogeneous computing environment. As we will see later in this document, a number of “Windows shops” are increasingly selecting the LAMP stack for online applications.


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1.3 Reliability MySQL is highly reliable as evidenced by a large number of Web properties, enterprises, and ISVs / OEMs whose businesses depend entirely on their applications and sites being up and available 24 X 7. With over 100 million copies distributed, the world most popular open source database is battle-tested in a wide variety of application scenarios by a huge number of users. 1.4 Performance and Scalability:

MySQL 5.5 delivers major improvements in performance & scalability on Windows: Up to 500% performance gains for the MySQL 5.5 Release Candidate version over MySQL 5.1 in Read Only operations. The following benchmark was presented during Oracle Open World 2010 in San Francisco:

To achieve these performance and scalability gains, the MySQL team added several Windows specific features & improvements to MySQL 5.5 including:

• Reworking the code to directly use higher performance native Windows APIs and primitives inside MySQL

• Adding the ability to build engines and other plugins as DLLs on Windows • Providing Network support for auto-detecting the MAC address • Improving Windows threading code.


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1.5 Ease of Use and Administration: Ease of use has been a design goal for MySQL since its inception. MySQL offers exceptional quick-start capability with an average time from software download to installation completion of less than fifteen minutes. Once installed, self-management features like automatic space expansion, auto-restart, and dynamic configuration changes take much of the burden off already overworked database administrators. MySQL also provides visual database design, development, administration and monitoring tools that make Windows database developers and DBA feel at home. We cover those tools in the third section of this whitepaper. 1.6 Integration into the Windows Environment A number of features exist to seamlessly integrate MySQL into the Windows environment: MySQL Connectors:

• ADO.NET Driver for MySQL (Connector/NET) • ODBC Driver for MySQL (Connector/ODBC)

MySQL Connectors provide connectivity to the MySQL server for a wide range of client programs. Microsoft Windows, .Net and C# are the flagship technologies for the Windows platform. MySQL Connector/NET is a fully managed ADO.NET driver written in 100% pure C# that enables developers to easily create .NET applications. It implements the required ADO.NET interfaces and integrates into ADO.NET aware tools. Integration with Visual Studio: The MySQL Connector/NET package also includes Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and 2010 integration, enabling the developers to work seamlessly with MySQL Connector/NET in the familiar Visual Studio environment. Connector/NET includes support for Entity Framework, enabling developers to design EF model from scratch and use Visual Studio 2010 facilities to generate MySQL DDL. Connector/NET also include a Visual Studio MySQL SQL editor that enabling direct execution SQL statements. Using Microsoft Access as Front End to MySQL Many organizations have developed thousands of small lightweight applications based on Microsoft Access. However, over time many of those applications have become business critical, outgrowing the capabilities of Access. MySQL provides a compelling alternative to Access for those organizations wanting to eliminate Access’ performance and scalability issues at a much lower cost than upgrading from Access to Microsoft SQL Server. A simple option transparent to end-users is to keep using Microsoft Access as a front end with a MySQL backend.


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We’ve now reviewed why overall MySQL has become an extremely popular choice on Windows. Let’s now try to better understand what kinds of MySQL applications users deploy on Microsoft’s platform.

2. MySQL on Windows – Where? MySQL is a popular choice to complement an existing database infrastructure. Over 50% of MySQL users also run Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition according to our internal surveys.

While a number of customers do migrate some of their applications from Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL, the majority select to deploy new applications and projects on the world’s most popular database. Let’s consider the three main categories of applications for which MySQL is typically deployed on Windows. 2.1 Web-Based Applications MySQL powers more web-based applications than any other database in the world including such high profile web sites as: Yahoo!, Google, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, plus thousands of corporate online applications. This makes MySQL an excellent choice for any web-based application on Windows. However, another option has become increasingly popular among organizations that previously relied on Windows for all their applications. While they continue to be “Windows shops”, they also want to take advantage of the LAMP stack we discussed


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earlier as best of breed stack for online applications. LAMP is chosen by savvy IT leaders as a way to improve operational efficiency and reduce IT infrastructure costs. And, LAMP is the proven technology stack used by a large majority of popular Web sites across the world including Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Craiglist and Zappos.

Case Study: Promovacances Boosts its Performance with MySQL Launched in 1998, Promovacances is a brand of the Karavel group, the leading provider of vacation packages online in France. Considering the increasing popularity of the online sales of vacation packages, Karavel concluded that the complexity of managing the replication of Microsoft SQL Server, the database on which their Web application was then based, was preventing them from handling their significant online traffic effectively. Promovacances.com gets about 40 million individual visitors per year and 250,000 per day during the high season. To support the company’ s growth and to deliver a high quality service, the engineering team decided to completely rearchitect the web site using the LAMP stack. "Choosing MySQL was quite natural", remarked Guillaume Postaire, infrastructure manager at Karavel, "MySQL has become the preferred choice for the vast majority of the web companies". Aside from web-based applications, MySQL is used extensively on Windows for internal enterprise custom applications.


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2.2 Custom Enterprise Applications Organizations selecting MySQL for their internal applications running on Microsoft Windows particularly value the following advantages:

• The ability to deploy on Windows, while retaining the flexibility to deploy the same application on different platforms. This point can be very important for government agencies with various entities, or global companies with numerous subsidiaries having different technology requirements.

• Performance • Low TCO with savings up to 90% over Microsoft SQL Server • The capacity to quickly develop and deploy applications, thanks to MySQL’s

ease of use • The low maintenance & administration requirements of the world’s most

popular database, along with the MySQL Enterprise Edition monitoring tools Custom-built enterprise business applications frequently implemented by MySQL customers include:

• Call Center applications such as a catalog of products and services that help telesales representatives sell additional products and services

• Research, documentation & testing such as medical research applications or documentation of manufacturing processes

• Human Resources applications including absence management and vacation tracking applications

• Helpdesk applications such as trouble ticket management applications • Financial applications including automation of loan applications, asset

management and financial reporting • Front-end applications to legacy systems such as order management or

Customer Relationship Management systems. Consider the following example: Alsego developed a Risk & Control Management solution running on Windows for one of the major asset management company in Luxembourg, mainly providing wealth management services. They decided to develop the business solution based on MySQL. Here is an excerpt of the interview we conducted with Marc Van Oost, CEO of Alsego. The full interview is available at: http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/cio-corner/interviews/ceo_Alsego.html Q: What is your business challenge? A: Flexibility is a key item; the system handles many different types of data for storing all description data of financial transactions, which could be successfully consolidated using MySQL. Our volume is not huge but the various types of information are significant. Then with any financial application, security is obviously a major concern, and MySQL provided the safety and robustness demanded by the application and its users.


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Last but not least, performance, as the application entails the update of approximately 2 million records on a daily basis. Currently we have an average of 20 concurrent users requesting complex financial statements; this results in about 56,000 queries and 250,000 transactions (Commits/Rollbacks) running each day if we take into account the Core platform Master Repository (security, session, log updates and audit trails). Q: Why did you choose to use MySQL? A: Because it’s extremely powerful; we needed a database engine that was very fast in terms of calculation, we have 100 different DCS (Data Collection Scenario that could be compared to execution plans for gathering data) and the users demand very fast response times – they cannot afford to wait for the results. Performance was the main reason for us. Secondly, AlSego is a young company and we knew that we could initially work with MySQL Community Edition in the event our development project was not successful, therefore limiting our commercial exposure. MySQL is one of the best RDBMS available – it’s flexible, multi-platform, and powerful. Plus, it offers automated monitoring via MySQL Enterprise Edition, so if there is a problem, we are aware of it before the client and work pro-actively to resolve the issue. This is quite unique. Q: Why did you choose to purchase the MySQL Enterprise Edition subscription? A: The end customer immediately saw the value of the MySQL Enterprise Edition subscription offering. The opportunity to benefit from the MySQL Enterprise replication monitoring as well as the replication automatic advisors is very valuable. Indeed, the company plans in the near future to roll out the same application in its subsidiaries abroad and therefore will intensively use replication for centralizing all the data at headquarters. The second reason is obtaining formal vendor technical support. The Luxembourgish financial regulatory agency imposes all financial institutions to secure their operational activities by ensuring they are able to count on expert assistance in case of critical issue. 2.3 Embedded Applications The third category of highly popular applications for MySQL on Windows is embedded applications. MySQL is the database of choice for a wide range of ISV/OEM software applications and hardware appliances running on Windows, such as:

• Network Management applications • Point of Sales systems & Retail Kiosks • Surveillance & Monitoring solutions • Security appliances • Healthcare & Practice Management applications • Telecom applications • Educational applications • …and more


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Why is MySQL so valued for embedded applications on Windows?

• Low Cost, up to 90% less than Microsoft SQL Server with features that ensure Costs of Goods Sold (COGS) remain low throughout an application's life cycle. Lower database costs allow vendors to offer their products at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions and the flexibility to appeal to more price-sensitive customers.

• Cross Platform Flexibility with support for over 20 platforms providing the freedom to ship products on multiple hardware and operating system combinations and into more markets. ISVs can provide applications running on pervasive Windows desktops, while allowing their customers to choose another platform if they elect to do so.

• High Performance, Reliability and Scalability to meet the requirements of the most demanding applications, such as Telecom and Network management, 24x7. Including a full-featured RDBMS helps to make products more competitive initially and over time as customers’ data needs inevitably increase.

• Ease-of-use with fast installation, configuration and integration so developers can focus on application development, reducing costs and time to market.

• Zero-administration, eliminating the need for customers to hire a dedicated DBA or spend any cycles on database administration, and reducing or eliminating costly database-related support calls.

Consider the following case study: The Sage Group The Sage Group plc, is one of the worldwide market leaders in accounting and business management software and services for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), with over 5.8 million customers and 14,500 employees in more than 26 countries. Simply Accounting by Sage had been using the Microsoft Jet Database engine within its products. In 2007, they started to experience problems and limitations with Jet: Data Corruption In 2007, Microsoft announced that it would no longer update Jet as part of Windows’ updates. As a result, existing issues like data corruption caused by reboots when Windows automatically downloaded updates were not going to be addressed by Microsoft. “Because many customers left their Simply Accounting applications open all the time, whenever Windows did an update, we would get a flood of calls. Even though this was not our fault, Simply Accounting took the blame. This is what really brought to light our need for a new database.” said You-Sheng Kang, Director Research and Development, Simply Accounting by Sage. Growing Customers’ Needs Unmet “In addition, we found that 11% of Simply Accounting’s customers were large and outgrowing Jet’s capabilities. Two-thirds of these 11% said they wanted to stay with Simply Accounting but they weren't ready to upgrade to Sage Accpac (mid-market ERP software),” said Jamie Sutherland, Vice President and General Manager, Simply Accounting by Sage. “Sage wanted to retain these customers and appeal to new customers whose needs fell in a gap between Sage’s home/ small business and


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mid-market applications. We needed a more scalable, high performance database, with greater capacity and the ability to handle concurrent users.” Sage Cross-Product Line Integration The third reason was to enable Sage cross-product integration. “Sage provides a choice of local offerings, designed to meet different customer needs, under a global brand. We had the opportunity to drive richer integration by standardizing on one database across a number of Sage products. We could see the cross-selling opportunities that would be created by combining Sage products, many of which are leaders in their respective markets,” said Jamie. MySQL was “above the rest” You-Sheng and his team selected nine databases to evaluate that were already in use within Sage products and/or appeared to be capable of meeting their requirements. After all of their testing and evaluation, You-Sheng concluded, “MySQL was certainly head and shoulders above the rest in meeting our requirements, especially with respect to performance.” In addition, You-Sheng and his team valued the following MySQL attributes: • Open Source: While this had not been a criterion, Sage saw it as a plus and a form of insurance: if they needed a fix, there was a high likelihood that the company behind MySQL (now Oracle) or the MySQL community would address it and open source gave Sage the freedom to fix it themselves. • Learning Curve: “MySQL was very easy to learn. Though he had no prior experience with MySQL, one programmer wrote the new driver for MySQL in under two months. And, when we were optimizing and re-writing queries there wasn't even a bump in the road,” said You-Sheng. • Zero Administration or Maintenance: “We like that administration can be hidden entirely with MySQL and there is zero separate maintenance,” said You-Sheng.

3. MySQL on Windows – How? Oracle provides a suite of tools required by IT professionals for developing, maintaining, and managing MySQL based business critical applications. These tools are developed by the MySQL team of developers and are fully tested and supported by MySQL Engineers. As a result, MySQL users get a quality experience from design and development, to management and monitoring. MySQL Enterprise Edition includes the most comprehensive set of MySQL production, backup, monitoring, modeling, development and administration tools and services so businesses can achieve the highest levels of performance, reliability, security and uptime.


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3.1 MySQL Enterprise Edition: MySQL Enterprise Edition reduces the risk, cost and time required in developing, deploying and managing business-critical MySQL applications. The MySQL Enterprise subscription is the only comprehensive offering of production support, monitoring tools and MySQL database software to deliver optimal performance, reliability, security, and uptime. In addition to the MySQL Database, MySQL Enterprise includes:

• The MySQL Enterprise Monitor: The MySQL Enterprise Monitor provides at-a-glance views of the health of your MySQL databases. It continuously monitors your MySQL servers and alerts you to potential problems before they impact your system. It’s like having a “virtual DBA” assistant at your side to recommend best practices and eliminate security vulnerabilities, improve replication, and optimize performance. As a result, DBAs and system administrators can manage more servers in less time.

"The MySQL Enterprise Monitor is an absolute must for any DBA who takes his work seriously." Adrian Baumann, System Specialist, Federal Office of Information Technology and Telecommunications


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MySQL Replication Monitor The MySQL Replication Monitor provides real-time replication health and status checks on master/slave performance and latency issues. MySQL Advisors The MySQL Enterprise Monitor includes more than 140 MySQL advisor rules that monitor more than 600 MySQL and operating system specific variables to help you automatically enforce MySQL recommended database best practices. They deliver expert advice that come straight from the database professionals who build the MySQL database. The advisors provide tailored step-by-step instructions to solve specific problems. The MySQL Enterprise Monitor includes the following:

• Upgrade Advisor - Monitors and advises you on using the most up-to-date version of MySQL.

• Administration Advisor - Enforces DBA best practices to prevent costly outages.

• Security Advisor - Minimizes exposure to security vulnerabilities.

• Replication Advisor - Recommends solutions for replication setup and performance improvements.

• Schema Advisor - Assists in uncovering database design issues that reduce performance.

• Performance Advisor - Recommends changes to boost database performance.

• Memory Usage Advisor - Monitors dynamic memory-related server metrics and recommends configuration changes to improve performance.

• Custom Advisor - Enables you to create custom best practice rules tailored to your needs.

MySQL Query Analyzer The MySQL Query Analyzer helps developers and DBAs improve application performance by monitoring queries and accurately pinpointing SQL code that is causing a slow down. With the new MySQL Connector Plug-ins, performance of Java and Microsoft .NET applications can be optimized more efficiently by communicating directly with the MySQL Query Analyzer. Queries are presented in an aggregated view across all MySQL servers so DBAs and developers can filter for specific query problems and analyze their most expensive code. With the MySQL Query Analyzer, DBAs can improve the SQL code during active development and continuously monitor and tune the queries in production.


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"The MySQL Query Analyzer gives us a better level of visibility into our database performance that we have never had before. Not only does it save us both time and resources, it allows us to be far better prepared when these applications go live, understanding exactly the demands that will be placed on the system." Phil Hildebrand, Database Manager, thePlatform, a subsidiary of Comcast interactive Media • MySQL Workbench MySQL Workbench is a unified visual tool that enables developers, DBAs, and data architects to design, develop and administer MySQL databases. MySQL Workbench provides advanced data modeling, a flexible SQL editor, and comprehensive administrative tools.


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MySQL Workbench allows you to:

• Design: MySQL Workbench includes everything a data modeler needs for creating complex ER models, forward and reverse engineering, and also delivers key features for performing difficult change management and documentation tasks that normally require much time and effort.

• Develop: MySQL Workbench delivers visual tools for creating, executing, and optimizing SQL queries. The SQL Editor provides color syntax highlighting, reuse of SQL snippets, and execution history of SQL. The Database Connections Panel enables developers to easily manage database connections. The Object Browser provides instant access to database schema and objects.

• Administer: MySQL Workbench provides a visual console to easily

administer MySQL environments and gain better visibility into databases. Developers and DBAs can use the visual tools for configuring servers, administering users, and viewing database health.

• MySQL Enterprise Backup MySQL Enterprise Backup performs online “Hot” backups of your MySQL databases. You get a consistent backup copy of your database to recover your data to a precise point in time. In addition, MySQL Enterprise Backup supports creating compressed backup files, and performing backups of subsets of InnoDB tables. Compression typically reduces backup size up to 90% when compared with the size of actual database files, helping to reduce storage costs. In conjunction with the MySQL binlog, users can perform point in time recovery.


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• Oracle Premier Support

MySQL Enterprise Edition provides 24x7x365 access to Oracle’s MySQL Support team, which is staffed by seasoned database experts ready to help with the most complex technical issues. Oracle’s Premier support provides you with: • 24x7x365 phone and online support • Rapid diagnosis and solution to complex issues • Unlimited incidents • Emergency hot fix builds• Access to Oracle’s MySQL Knowledge Base• Consultative support services 3.2 MySQL High Availability Solutions Databases are the center of modern enterprise applications, storing and protecting an organization’s most valuable assets including customer information, product information, order information and historical data. Plus, organizations rely on databases to run their business-critical applications. Hours or even minutes of downtime often result in significant amounts of lost revenue and unsatisfied customers. Making database applications highly available is a top priority for all organizations. MySQL provides a number of options to make a database infrastructure highly available. Selecting which high availability solution is right for you largely depends on how many “nines” of availability you require and the type of application you are deploying.


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MySQL provides you with the following options on Windows: MySQL Replication Using MySQL Replication, organizations can cost-effectively deliver a high availability solution. Master/Slave replication enables operations to quickly fail-over to another server in the event of a hardware or software problem. In addition, with MySQL replication, organizations can incrementally scale out their infrastructure to accommodate exponentially growing capacity demands. MySQL Replication ships out of the box and is used extensively by some of the world’s most highly trafficked Web sites including YouTube, Yahoo!, flickr, Wikipedia and craigslist. In MySQL 5.5, new semi-synchronous replication and replication Heart Beat improve the reliability of data and the speed of failover for continuous application availability. MySQL Cluster MySQL Cluster enables organizations to deliver 5 Nines (99.999%) availability using a parallel server architecture with no single point of failure. MySQL Cluster is an in-memory database that synchronously replicates data to all server nodes in its cluster. This results in sub-second response time and extremely fast failover. Data partitioning, fail-over, and recovery are automatically handled by MySQL Cluster. MySQL Cluster is used by the world’s leading telecom organizations including Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel and Nokia.


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Conclusion In this whitepaper, we’ve explored why MySQL has become hugely popular on Windows, the type of applications MySQL users commonly deploy on Microsoft platforms, and the tools at your disposal for developing and running business critical applications based on the world’s most popular open source database. With MySQL on Windows you can:

• Dramatically lower your TCO, while relying on 24/7 support worldwide delivered by Oracle’s MySQL experts

• Quickly deploy and scale new applications, leveraging a database reknown for it ease of use and administration

• Have the flexibility to deploy applications on different platforms, choosing Linux/LAMP, or one of the 20+ operating systems MySQL runs on, for specific applications

Additional Resources MySQL on Windows Resource Center (including whitepapers, webinars, technical articles): http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/windows/ MySQL on Windows Customer References http://www.mysql.com/customers/operatingsystem/?id=109 MySQL Enterprise Edition Trial: http://www.mysql.com/trials/ To contact an Oracle MySQL Representative: http://www.mysql.com/about/contact/

MySQL on Windows WWH final - · PDF fileMySQL also provides visual database design, development, administration and ... Server, the database on which their Web application was then

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