When our consultants are asked to recommend an RDBMS, their stock response is to ask: “What do you want the database to do?”, “What skills have you already got?” “What database systems have you already committed resources and data to?”
We are most likely to recommend an investment in MySQL training, if you are resourcing a new project, especially one with a web focus, because supporting database-driven websites is one of the things that MySQL does best. MySQL is probably the world’s most popular website backend (on all major operating systems, Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac, etc), because it is stunningly fast at reading data, i.e. the thing that data-driven websites do most of the time. The price isn’t bad either!
MySQL is also a pretty good choice for generic database applications in small and medium sized business (SME/SMB) environments, providing power and reliability beyond the likes of MS Access, and price/performance advantages over unnecessarily heavy duty RDBMSes like Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server.
MySQL is not currently the best choice for massively complex data centre operations in very large enterprises (e.g. processing hundreds of millions of records in highly interdependent systems), but it is rapidly acquiring many of the features which have previously excluded it from this domain (e.g. transactions, sub-selects, triggers, etc). Although most of these features appear in the latest MySQL development releases, we are not yet confident enough of their maturity to recommend them for the largest business-critical applications.

The MySQL database has become the world's leading open source database. With consistent fast performance, high reliability and ease of use it is the open source database of choice for many organizations. This introductory course covers all the basics of MySQL.