Search the MySQL manual:

1.8 How Standards-compatible Is MySQL?

This section describes how MySQL relates to the ANSI/ISO SQL standards. MySQL Server has many extensions to the SQL standard, and here you will find out what they are and how to use them. You will also find information about functionality missing from MySQL Server, and how to work around some differences.

Our goal is to not, without a very good reason, restrict MySQL Server usability for any usage. Even if we don't have the resources to do development for every possible use, we are always willing to help and offer suggestions to people who are trying to use MySQL Server in new territories.

One of our main goals with the product is to continue to work toward compliance with the SQL-99 standard, but without sacrificing speed or reliability. We are not afraid to add extensions to SQL or support for non-SQL features if this greatly increases the usability of MySQL Server for a big part of our users. (The new HANDLER interface in MySQL Server 4.0 is an example of this strategy. See section 6.4.2 HANDLER Syntax.)

We will continue to support transactional and non-transactional databases to satisfy both heavy web/logging usage and mission-critical 24/7 usage.

MySQL Server was designed from the start to work with medium size databases (10-100 million rows, or about 100 MB per table) on small computer systems. We will continue to extend MySQL Server to work even better with terabyte-size databases, as well as to make it possible to compile a reduced MySQL version that is more suitable for hand-held devices and embedded usage. The compact design of the MySQL server makes both of these directions possible without any conflicts in the source tree.

We are currently not targeting realtime support or clustered databases (even if you can already do a lot of things with our replication services).

We don't believe that one should have native XML support in the database, but will instead add the XML support our users request from us on the client side. We think it's better to keep the main server code as ``lean and clean'' as possible and instead develop libraries to deal with the complexity on the client side. This is part of the strategy mentioned previously of not sacrificing speed or reliability in the server.

Subsections

User Comments

Add your own comment.