NuSphere MySQL Advantage

The "advantage" in this product's name refers to a subscription service that comes in addition to the CD-ROM. Every quarter for a year, NuSphere ships its registered users an update disk that contains the latest stable versions of the four packages, plus additional goodies of their choosing. You get technical support, too: Web and e-mail support for a year. A similar NuSphere product--NuSphere MySQL--consists of the same base CD-ROM, but without the update subscription and tech support.

The lesser product also lacks the enhancements that NuSphere has made to the generic MySQL distribution. Their improved product--it's called Enhanced MySQL--allows row-level locking and therefore greater transaction loads. The enhancements also make it easier to recover from crashes and to better protect your data from unwanted access. NuSphere's modifications to the core MySQL make it more suitable for big database jobs.

But is MySQL any good? Experience says it's excellent. The big boys of databases--Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft, and others--would like you to believe that only their big, expensive RDBMS products are good enough to handle your data. It's just not true. Most of the time, you'll find that MySQL--Enhanced MySQL, particularly--is entirely adequate for storing, retrieving, and reporting on your pieces of data. It supports standard Structured Query Language (SQL), and should be familiar to anyone who has done SQL work in any environment before. MySQL has been tested extensively, and has been found to stack up well against commercial database products, particularly with small- to mid-size data stores and moderate transaction loads. So, unless you have unusually tough requirements (such as an astronomical transaction load or a need for a feature that's available only in commercial RDBMSes), MySQL can do what you want reliably and speedily. It's a well-built RDBMS that does everything most applications require, enhanced by the programming languages and tools that have grown up around it. This kit includes version 3.23.41.

PHP is similar in function to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) and Sun's JavaServer Pages (JSP) scripting languages. PHP code is embedded in documents that are to be sent out by a Web server, and is interpreted before the page gets served. That means you can use PHP (version 4.0.6 is part of the NuSphere product) to do database lookups; the language has a set of commands specifically for connecting to MySQL databases. PHP can format the results of the lookups as HTML, which the Web server would then send to the requesting browser. You can set up HTML forms to be submitted to PHP scripts as well, which means you can use HTML, PHP, and MySQL together to create complete user interfaces for your databases.

If you prefer Perl to PHP or require its more extensive text-manipulation capabilities, this kit provides you with Perl 5.6.1. Like PHP, Perl has modules that make it easy to query MySQL databases and use the results in your applications. Perl, like PHP, can be used to generate Web pages based on query results.

What ties all this together is Apache, the popular, refined, and extensible open-source Web server. Apache (version 1.3.20 here) serves HTML pages, of course, but also makes Perl and PHP scripts available to users on the network. It's reliable and customizable.

There's documentation, too. Three commercially available books (all from O'Reilly & Associates, and with plenty of detail) ship as part of this package:

• Apache Pocket Reference
• Perl 5 Pocket Reference, Third Edition
• MySQL/PHP Database Applications

Partly because the four software packages in this kit are so great, and partly because NuSphere's installation routine solves so many configuration hassles, NuSphere MySQL Advantage is a great value. Don't hesitate to buy it if you need to bring up a Web server in a hurry, require some help with the process, and plan to maintain it over time. --David Wall