- Oracle's strategy is to provide a complete, open, and integrated stack including MySQL. They have made investments in open source projects like MySQL to expand the developer community and speed up innovation.
- MySQL 5.5 includes improvements like InnoDB as the default storage engine, semi-synchronous replication, and performance gains of over 300% on benchmarks compared to previous versions.
- The mysqli extension provides full support for modern MySQL features while ext/mysql is limited. mysqlnd provides a native driver for PHP that improves performance versus libmysql. Caching and other mysqlnd plugins provide opportunities to optimize database usage.