SQL Server 2012 and MySQL 5

A Detailed Comparison of Approaches and Features

SQL Server White Paper


Published: April 2012
Applies to: SQL Server 2012
Introduction:
The question whether to implement commercial vs. open source software is a debate that has
been going on for years. Open source software such as MySQL is typically very low cost or no
cost at all. However, even those who think that implementing open source software saves
money agree that free does not mean no cost. While the upfront cost of the software and
licenses might be low or no cost, the overall cost to implement and maintain the software can be
quite substantial. Moreover, support and consulting fees can be higher than most organizations
expect, which raises the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
On the other side, commercial software such as Microsoft SQL Server 2012 achieves an overall
superior performance because the development teams who work on the products invest
hundreds of thousands of man hours of time and millions of dollars in research and
development costs to ensure their products are able to support organizations business needs
and run their most mission-critical applications. Microsoft also understands the need of
organizations very well and satisfies those requirements by building features into multiple SQL
Server releases.
This paper compares the major features of both the latest version of SQL Server 2012 and
MySQL 5 (including 5.5) in each product in five separate categories. It will help customers
choose which database is most suitable for their database applications.
SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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Copyright
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on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to
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2012 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Microsoft & SQL Server are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.

All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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Contents
Executive Summary ................................................................................................................... 4
Product Editions ......................................................................................................................... 5
SQL Server 2012 .................................................................................................................... 5
MySQL 5 ................................................................................................................................ 5
Feature Comparison .................................................................................................................. 5
Engine .................................................................................................................................... 6
Enterprise Features ................................................................................................................ 8
Security .................................................................................................................................10
Tools .....................................................................................................................................10
Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence, and Big Data ..........................................................12
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................13
References: ..............................................................................................................................14


SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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Executive Summary
SQL Server 2012 has better features than MySQL in the categories of engine, enterprise,
security, tools, data warehouse, business intelligence, and big data. Although customers can
download MySQL for free, Oracle highly recommends customers to purchase expensive
software support for all MySQL editions for production and that might increase the Total Cost of
Ownership (TCO) in implementing MySQL.
Moreover, there are also well-known inherent issues of security that come with open source
software development as it is typically done by members of the open source community, which
is made up of volunteers, including (but not limited to):
Introduction of bugs into software. For MySQL, many community developers contribute
to the source code. Bugs can easily be introduced into the product if the skill level of
developers is not known or cannot be guaranteed. However, commercial software
companies like Microsoft ensure that developers have the appropriate skill level to
contribute to their products. Most recently, MySQL (part of Oracle) has failed its high profile
customer Zappos.com which uses MySQL Enterprise. The web site was hacked and
becoming the largest data breach ever where 24 million account information was accessed
by hackers.
Response to security threats. Microsoft has teams of engineers who are responsible for
doing nothing but responding to security threats and patch is made available almost
immediately should a vulnerability be exposed. As the result, SQL Server has the least
amount of security vulnerability among database products in the last 10 years according to
NIST. On the other hands, MySQL has more security vulnerabilities in the last 10 years and
Oracle continues to release many MySQL patches every quarter. Most recently, Oracle
released 27 patches for MySQL in one day.
In fact, MySQL public web site mysql.com has been targeted and was hacked multiple times in
the past year alone where username and password were exposed in public web site. As
database breaches become more catastrophic to businesses, MySQL is becoming more
vulnerable and customers need to understand the risks when evaluating MySQL in production
environment.
While there are few positive aspects of MySQL 5, this paper shows that SQL Server 2012 is the
clear choice for all aspects of businesses and all types of applications, including those that are
the most mission-critical that requires highest performance, scale, high availability, security,
manageability, as well as ability to make better business decisions based on data.

SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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Product Editions
SQL Server 2012
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 is a cloud-ready information platform that will help organizations
unlock breakthrough insights across the organization and quickly build solutions to extend data
across on-premises and public cloud, backed by mission critical confidence.
Small, mid-sized, and enterprise customers can all benefit from SQL Server 2012. Regardless
of budget or business requirements, there is an appropriate edition of SQL Server 2012. One of
the major advantages of having multiple editions is that they are all produced using the same
database engine:
Enterprise for mission critical applications and large scale data warehousing
Business Intelligence, a new product edition, providing premium corporate and self-service
BI
Standard for basic database, reporting and analytics capabilities
Express Edition scaled-down free edition that can be freely downloaded as well as freely
distributed by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)

MySQL 5
MySQL 5 (including the latest 5.5) is available in multiple editions which contain all the core
features (except Cluster edition) described later in this paper:
Community, for free download version under GPL license v2 that is fully controlled by
Oracle but does accept patches from the community.
Enterprise, a commercial version that combines MySQL database, enterprise backup,
enterprise monitor, and workbench standard edition.
Cluster, a specialized but feature-limited engine for real-time transactional database
designed for high throughput condition such as Telco.
Oracle charges support for commercial edition of MySQL. On the high-end, MySQL does not
contain many of the enterprise-level features required to run highly available, mission-critical
applications, such as AlwaysOn, clustering, and online operations. The major features
supported in MySQL are outlined in the next section.
Feature Comparison
Because of the large number of features in both SQL Server 2012 and MySQL 5, the
comparison of each is broken into the following categories: engine, enterprise, security, tools,
data warehouse, business intelligence, and big data.

SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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For each of the features presented in this paper, the following visual keys are used to indicate
the extent to which each feature is supported by SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition and
MySQL 5 Enterprise Edition:
- Feature is fully supported
- Feature is partially supported
- Feature is not supported
Engine
The engine in a database system is the core technology that processes data. The engine
handles all inserts, updates, deletes, and selects from the database, as well as optimization,
indexing, and all other base-level processing supported by a database technology. The
comparison of engine features is shown in Table 1.
Feature MySQL 5.5 SQL Server 2012 Comments
Automatic
Tuning
Automatic tuning optimizes the database
for best performance. This eliminates
administrative burden on DBAs.
Cascading
Referential
Integrity
Automatically updates or deletes data in
nested tables that participate in foreign
key relationships.
Indexed
Views
Indexed views provide optimal
performance of database views.
Multiple
Instances
Multiple instances refers to the ability for a
single server to host more than one
instance of the database server.
Multiple
Languages
Ability to display messages in languages
other than English. Also controls the
sorting of dates, times, and currency, and
strings.
Rules Enables you to control the valid values
that can be stored in a column in a table.
Stored
Procedures
Enables you to encapsulate complex SQL
statements into a single procedure that
can be called from applications or within
other SQL statements.
Transactions Ability to treat a set of SQL statements as
a single unit of work, thereby allowing
exactly all or none of the statements to
complete.
Triggers Automatically notifies, or fires, when
defined events occur in a database, such
SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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Feature MySQL 5.5 SQL Server 2012 Comments
as the changing of data in a table.
User-defined
Functions
Method of providing programmatic means
to complex functionality inline with SQL
statements.
User-defined
Data Types
Ability to create a data type that is not
available out of the box, that
corresponds to business requirements.
Views Method of abstracting and filtering specific
columns or rows in an underlying table,
but still looks like a table to SQL queries.
UPSERT logic SQL Server supports UPSERT operation
(combination of update and insert into a
single clause) using MERGE statement.
Sequence
object
SQL Server has object containing
sequence of numeric values generated in
an ascending or descending order at a
defined interval and can be configured to
restart (cycle) when exhausted.
Parallel Query SQL Server provides parallel queries to
optimize query execution and index
operations.
Distributed
Federated
Query
SQL Server supports distributed queries
access data from multiple heterogeneous
data sources.
Database
Links
SQL Server can access tables from
heterogeneous data sources.
Native XML
Support and
XML
processing
SQL Server stores XML data as a native
type, which allows indexing and querying
using industry-standard technologies, like
XQuery.
Available at
no cost
The Express Edition of SQL Server is
available at no cost.
Cross-
platform
support
MySQL runs on Unix and Linux, as well as
Windows. SQL Server runs only on
Windows.
Multiple row
data storage
strategy
Data is stored in a way that ensures good
performance in high-transaction
environments.
Service
Broker
SQL Server Service Broker is used for
Asynchronous communications with other
SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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Feature MySQL 5.5 SQL Server 2012 Comments
applications.
Full-Text
Searching
Ability to catalog the data that comprises a
text column so that it can be easily
queried.
Index
Organized
Table
SQL Server uses clustered indexes
(index-organized tables) on the primary
key per default.
Filtered
Indexes
Filtered Indexes that provide high-
performance lookups of subsets of data in
SQL Server.
Persisted
Computed
Column
Computed column in SQL Server is
computed from an expression that can use
other columns in the same table.
FileTable Brings support for the Windows file
namespace and compatibility with
Windows applications to the file data
stored in SQL Server.
Hierarchical
Data Type
Makes it easier to store and query
hierarchical data in SQL Server
XEvents General event-handling system for SQL
Server and Windows Server.
CLR
Integration
CLR hosted in Microsoft SQL Server
(called CLR integration)allows authoring of
stored procedures, triggers, user-defined
functions, user-defined types, and user-
defined aggregates in managed code.
Integrated
Database Mail
Allowing sending of bulk emails from SQL
Server databases.
Table 1: Comparison of Engine Features.
Enterprise Features
Enterprise Features refers to more advanced capabilities that are needed in a medium or large
enterprise. These features are not typically used in a small business. SQL Server 2012 clearly
excels in its enterprise features. The comparison of enterprise features is shown in Table 2.
Feature MySQL 5.5 SQL Server 2012 Comments
64-Bit Support MySQL & SQL Server support 64-bit.
Distributed Method to efficiently access federated
SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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Feature MySQL 5.5 SQL Server 2012 Comments
Partitioned
Views
databases.
Failover
Clustering
Both MySQL and SQL Server supports
Windows Clustering
AlwaysOn SQL Server supports synchronous and
asynchronous multiple active secondary
servers.
Log Shipping Applies the transactions in the transaction
log to another server for high availability.
Replication MySQL & SQL Server support replication.
Multi-device
support
Both MySQL and SQL Server can run in
embedded scenarios.
Advanced
Compression
Help compress the data inside a database
to help reduce the size of the database
and improve performance of I/O intensive
workloads in SQL Server.
Online
Backups
Backups can be performed without taking
the database offline.
SAN Support While a SAN can be used with both
products, SQL Server has built-in support
for a Storage Area Network.
Complex
Event
Processing
SQL Server StreamInsight provides
complex event processing capabilities.
Data Quality SQL Server Data Qualities Services
enables correction, enrichment,
standardization, and de-duplication of data
using knowledge-driven method.
Master Data
Management
SQL Server Master Data Services
provides solution for master data
management.
Hot Add
Memory &
CPU
SQL Server allows adding CPU and
Memory while it is running.
Online
Schema
Change
SQL Server allows changing database
schema while it is running.
Resource
Governor
SQL Server provides lower and upper
limits of resource management for
performance consistencies
SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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Table 2: Comparison of Enterprise Features.
Security
Security is at the forefront of everyones mind. SQL Server 2012 has better built-in advanced
security features. The comparison of security features is shown in Table 3.
Feature MySQL 5.5 SQL Server 2012 Comments
Active
Directory
Support
Kerberos authentication is supported with
both products for Active Directory
support.
Role-Based Users can be grouped into roles they
assume in the database. Then,
permissions can be assigned to those
roles.
SSL
Encryption
Encryption of TCP/IP connections to the
database for added security.
Stored
Procedure
Security
Ability to apply security permissions to
stored procedures.
Table Security Ability to apply security permissions to
tables.
View Security Ability to apply security permissions to
views.

Auditing SQL Server has built in comprehensive
auditing capabilities
Transparent
Data
Encryption
SQL Server supports real-time I/O
encryption and decryption of the data and
log files.
Centralized
Key
Management
SQL Server allows storing encryption
keys in hardware security modules
devices.
Table 3: Comparison of Security Features.
Tools
Tools in a database system allow it to be managed in an easy and efficient manner. SQL Server
has much more built-in database tools and excels in its ability to manage one or more SQL
Servers. The comparison of tools features is shown in Table 4.
SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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Feature MySQL 5.5 SQL Server 2012 Comments
Centralized
Administration

Administration of one or more servers is
performed in single, centralized place.
Integrated
SQL
Debugger
Debugger is integrated into the
development environment.
Profiler Tool for measuring and monitoring
performance and server health.
Graphical
Query Tool

Graphical (GUI) tools for querying the
database.
Database
Tuning
Advisor
SQL Server uses current workloads to
determine how to best tune a database.
Distributed
Replay
Tool to replay captured trace and
simulate mission-critical workload
against an upgraded test environment to
help assess the impact of hardware and
operating system upgrades.
Graphical
Wizards
SQL Server has many wizards to guide
through administrative tasks. MySQL has
a few dialog boxes, which are referred to
as Wizards.
Graphical
Activity
Monitor
MySQL does not have native GUI
monitoring tool for performance and
needs Enterprise Monitor (separate
product).
Central
Management
Servers
MySQL does not have the capability to
execute SQL statements at the same
time against server groups
SQL Server
Utility
Manage SQL Server environment as a
whole with summary and detailed data in
terms of underutilization and
overutilization policies for a variety of key
parameters such as CPU, file spaces.
Manage
servers using
Policy
Policy-Based Management allows
managing one or more instances of SQL
Server based on extensive policies.
Maintenance
Plan Wizard
SQL Server maintenance plan wizard
create a workflow of the tasks required to
make sure database is optimized,
regularly backed up, and free of
consistencies.
SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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Feature MySQL 5.5 SQL Server 2012 Comments
Dedicated
Administrator
Connection
SQL Server provides ways to let
administrator troubleshoot very busy
databases.
Data-tier
Application
SQL Server can package database
applications (schema, objects, and data)
into a single unit of deployment
Table 4: Comparison of Tools Features.
Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence, and Big Data
Data warehouse, Business Intelligence, and Big Data is simply the ability to make better
business decisions based on data. Users are often trying to spot trends in data. However,
trends might exist that the business analyst doesnt know to look for. The ability to load data
from multiple, disparate data sources, process that data, and analyze it is an enormous strength
of SQL Server. Microsoft has made very large investments in R&D in this area and provides
many more of these features in SQL Server 2012 than does MySQL 5. The comparison of is
shown in Table 5.
Feature MySQL 5.5 SQL Server 2012 Comments
Bitmap Index
Joins
SQL Server speed up data warehouse
queries using bitmap joins.
Common
Table
Expressions
SQL Server can create temporary result
set that is defined within the execution
scope that can be self-referencing and
can be referenced multiple times in the
same query.
xVelocity in-
memory
column store
index
SQL Server in-memory column store
index delivers 10x-100x faster
performance for Data Warehousing
queries.
Change Data
Capture
SQL Server provides way to capture
insert, update, and delete activities
applied to tables.
Data
Warehouse
Alliance
SQL Server and MySQL have an alliance
of Data Warehousing vendors.
Data
Warehouse
Reference
Architectures
SQL Server has multiple data warehouse
reference architectures from multiple
hardware vendors. MySQL has specific
3rd party engines for data warehouse.
SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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Feature MySQL 5.5 SQL Server 2012 Comments
Data
Warehouse
Appliances
SQL Server has multiple data warehouse
appliances from multiple hardware
vendors.
Integration
Services, also
known as
Extract,
Transform,
and Load
(ETL).
SQL Server has extensive and robust
ETL capabilities.
High Speed
Drivers
SQL Server supports high performance
Oracle and Teradata destinations
Analysis
Services
(OLAP)
Ability to build OLAP, ROLAP, and
MOLAP database cubes.
Data Mining SQL Server supports algorithms for
mining structured data.
Text Mining SQL Server supports algorithms for
mining unstructured text data.
English Query SQL Server English query is the ability to
query the database using English syntax
instead of SQL syntax.
Reporting
Services
SQL Server has a graphical reporting
solution for different types of users.
PowerPivot SQL Server provides deep Integration
into Microsoft Excel to query and view
data in OLAP and OLTP databases.
Big Data
Support
SQL Server is shipping with Hadoop
adapters for Big Data processing
Table 5: Comparison of Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence, and Big Data Features.
Conclusion
SQL Server 2012 excels in numerous ways compares to MySQL 5. SQL Server 2012 contain
many more features than MySQL 5 in the categories of engine, enterprise, security, tools, data
warehouse, business intelligence, and big data. Therefore, SQL Server is the clear choice for all
aspects of businesses and all types of applications, including those that are the most mission-
critical.
SQL Server 2012 Compared With MySQL 5
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References:

SQL Server Web Site http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/default.aspx
MySQL Web Site http://www.mysql.com/
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