Is MySQL so bad?

This week at university lecture about using databases in Java the students were told that MySQL doesn't support Prepared Statements.

In fact they are supported since 2005. There are many rumours about MySQL, that's why I decided share my own knowledge and experience here.

MySQL History

MySQL was created as a fast database which wasn't supposed to support advanced techniques as are foreign keys and similar. This database system was developed by swedish company MySQL AB, which was took over by Sun Microsystems, which recently became an acquisition of Oracle Corporation know for it's own database Oracle which is usually seen the state of the art.

MySQL AB published it's database under GNU/GPL license and chose the way of double licensing (offering commercial license, support and additional software). Free license enable MySQL to became the most widely used database in the world as a part of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

However the boom of MySQL brought preassure on developers to implement advanced elements which haven't been expected to be included. This sometimes leads to truly unexpected features, e.g. bewildered error messages.

So what is MySQL capable of?

The current stable version of MySQL  is 5.1.44 (the developers' is 5.5.2 m2) handles transactions, foreign keys, views, prepared statements, stored procedures, triggers and finally finer control of user rights. However I am still missing some support of user roles, which doesn't affect common content management systems but it can be quite unpleasant for multi-user applications.