The main features of MySQL

• Fully multi-threaded using kernel threads. That means that it easily can use multiple CPUs if available.
• C, C++, JAVA, Perl, Python and TCL API's. See section MySQL client tools and API's
• Works on a lot of different platforms. See section Which operating systems does MySQL support?.
• Lots of column types like: signed/unsigned integers 1,2,3,4 and 8 bytes long, FLOAT, DOUBLE, CHAR, VARCHAR, TEXT, BLOB, DATE, DATETIME, YEAR, SET and ENUM types. See section Column types.
• Very fast joins using a optimised one-sweep multi-join.
• Full function support in the SELECT and WHERE parts. Example: select column1 + column2 from table where column1/column2 > 0
• SQL functions are implemented through a very optimised class library and should be as fast as they can get! Usually there shouldn't be any memory allocation at all after the query initialisation.
• Full support for SQL GROUP BY and ORDER BY. Support for group functions (COUNT, AVG, STD, SUM, MAX and MIN).
• Support for LEFT OUTER JOIN with ANSI SQL and ODBC syntax.
• One can mix tables from different databases in the same query (in 3.22).
• A privilege and password system which is very flexible and secure. Allows host based verification.
• Secure passwords since all password traffic on the net is encrypted.
• ODBC Open-DataBase-Connectivity for Windows95 (with source). All ODBC 2.5 functions and lots of others. So you can for example use Access to connect to your MySQL server. See section ODBC
• Very fast B-tree disk tables with index compression.
• 16 indexes/table. Each index may consist of 1 to 15 columns/parts of columns. Max index length is 256 bytes (but may be changed when compiling MySQL. An index may be a prefix of a CHAR field.
• Fixed and variable length records.
• In memory hash tables which are used as temporary tables.
• Handles large databases (we are using MySQL with some databases that contain 50,000,000 records).
• All columns have default values. One can always use INSERT on any subset of columns.
• Uses GNU autoconf for portability.
• Written in C and C++. Tested with a broad range of different compilers.
• A very fast thread-based memory allocation system.
• No memory leaks. Tested with a commercial memory leakage detector (purify).
• A very fast table check,optimize and repair utility. See section The MySQL table check, optimise and repair program
• All data saved in ISO8859_1 format. All comparisons for normal string columns are case insensitive.
• Full ISO8859_1 (Latin1) support. For example Scandinavian едц is allowed in table and column names.
• Sorts by ISO8859_1 Latin1 (the Swedish way at the moment). It is possible to change this in the source by adding new sort order arrays. To see a example of a very advanced sorting, look at the Czeck sorting code.
• Alias on tables and columns as in the SQL92 standard.
• DELETE, INSERT, REPLACE, and UPDATE returns how many rows were affected.
• Function names do not clash with table or column names. For example ABS is a valid column name. The only restriction is that space is not allowed between a function name and the '(' when using functions. See section Is MySQL picky about reserved words?
• All MySQL commands have --help or -? for help.
• The server currently supports error messages to clients in many languages. See section Which languages are supported by MySQL?.
• The clients use a TCP connection or Unix socket when connecting to the MySQL server.
• User commands as show tables, SHOW INDEX FROM table and show columns from table

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