This has been an ongoing argument within the engineering staffs at my company for ages... mySQL is fast, but it does not allow for any relational integrity of data within the tables themselves; it also does not support transactions, which I feel is not made up by the improvement in speed. Even simple webpages can eventually end up making multiple updates/inserts/deletes into a database that could potentially cause problems, and would easily be handled by a rollback statement, but with mySQL you have to handle the transaction pieces yourself. PostgreSQL is really a quality free product that performs almost everything that Oracle can do without the pricetag. (not too sure on the scalability as I haven't used it in large deployments) And as a benefit, PostgreSQL allows stored procedures to be written in Perl!