The examples in this book use MySQL, a fast, lightweight, open source database. You
can download and use it for free, although a paid version with technical support is available
from http://www.mysql.com/. MySQL is a good choice for applications that are not
large enough to warrant purchasing an expensive database license. MySQL is also commonly
used in web applications, because MySQL support is provided by a high
percentage of Internet web hosts.
A number of high-profile organizations and web sites??”Apple, Craigslist, Google
AdWords, Flickr, Slashdot, and many others??”use MySQL. Slashdot, shown in Figure 1-1,
handles more than 150 million page views per day.
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C H A P T E R 1
Figure 1-1. Slashdot.org is a high-traffic site that uses MySQL.
The techniques covered in this book will also generally work without modification on
PostgreSQL, a fast and full-featured open source database. You can download and use
PostgreSQL for free from http://www.postgresql.org/. PostgreSQL includes a number of
features that are comparable to those available with large, commercial databases, and it
performs just as well (and in some cases, better) as those databases.
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