MySQL versus MS SQL and SQL Express

Is there any real use for the piece of trash known as MySQL. In my adventures working with MySQL lately, I have seen the bottom of crap. I can hardly believe that I (or anyone else for that matter) considered MySQL an "Enterprise" class database. No groups, no roles, horrible ADO and ODBC connectors. Honestly... If you want to save a few dollars go get SQL Express from Microsoft.

As I have said before I have recently become a huge fan of Microsoft. While everyone complains that the costs to buy their software are high. I believe the "TRUE" ROI becomes apparent as soon as you try to do anything with it. For example; I used to enjoy programming in PHP and MySQL. But as of late I just can't get myself to be tortured enough to leave the wonderful world of Visual Studio, .Net, and SQLExpress. If you have a small business or are a team of few, really there is no excuse to not use Microsoft’s products. You can say… well I don’t want to spend several thousand dollars on their software. (you could say inferior… but you would just be flat out lying) But what about the Express Suite of Visual Studio and SQL. At the entire cost of “FREE” and as well as royalty “FREE” how can you complain. Also with the extended ROI and pure bliss of development you just get less and less things to complain about.

I think my true turning point on PHP and MySQL was on a custom web product I wrote simply using IIS, MSDE, and ASP (classic). Even using ASP without OOP I still enjoyed the reduced headache and lack of maintenance (and the product looked and worked much better)