Again, I donÂt want to mislead you into thinking MySQL has more features than SQL Server because the truth is it doesnÂt. But the features and capabilities MySQL does possess is usually more than enough to handle systems that need a strong OLTP or analytical database. But also understand that, although both SQL Server and MySQL have complementary features in many areas, there are sections where the depth of what SQL Server offers is better than MySQL. For example, both MySQL and SQL Server have GIS features, but SQL ServerÂs is more robust than MySQLÂs. Ditto when it comes to their job scheduler vs. ours. But conversely, there are cases when MySQL rises above SQL Server in some ways, such as partitioning  SQL Server does have parallel support for partitioning, but MySQL provides more options for various types of partitioning: MySQL offers range, hash, key, list, and composite partitioning whereas SQL Server only offers range. And continuing with the example of partitioning, I find MySQLÂs partitioning much easier to use as itÂs defined right with the table via DDL during creation time vs. creating partitioning objects in SQL Server (partition schemes and functions) that are then applied to tables.
Of course, there are features in SQL Server MySQL has no complement for. Security is one particular area where MySQL trails Microsoft  unlike SQL Server, MySQL has no concept of roles or external authentication, and its data auditing abilities are quite weak compared to Microsoft. I could list many more features that SQL Server has over MySQL (e.g. better query optimizations and methods, transparent data encryption, etc.), but as I said earlier, MySQL isnÂt about going all out with Microsoft or anyone else in the features arena.
From the sidebar:
Robin Schumacher is MySQL's Director of Product Management and has over 13 years of database experience in DB2, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server and other database engines.
http://dev.mysql.com...t_SQL_Server.html