- MySQL allows many interesting variations on standard SQL
- In some cases, these can be considered developer-friendly
- These can also considered to be hindrances to supporting multiple databases
- Your hosting service might provide different databases (for example, hub.org offers PHP with PostgreSQL)
- You may be interested in enhancing your portable, standard database development skills
- Potential customers of your software might have standardized software environments and required a different database. Prediction from Mark Driver of Gartner Consulting on Sept. 13, 2005:
PHP will become a mainstream enterprise tool.
Note: Recent releases of MySQL show that it, too, is adopting more
standard SQL -- so this presentation should help you port your MySQL application
to MySQL, as well.