I couldn't agree more. Companies would save huge amounts of money if they took intelligent advantage of open source options where appropriate. For what it matters, I asked Monty Widenius about stored procedures at the MySQL session in Monterey last year. He made a point that I've since used in discussions with others -- stored procedures are essentially a mechanism to prevent programmers who don't understand the database from messing up, or providing other kinds of security. If the programmers actually understand the structure (so Monty) they don't really need foreign keys or triggers either.

I guess I've concluded that small projects, projects without terribly complex data structures and projects in organizations with clued programmers should take MySQL very seriously as an option. In such situations, the benefits far outweigh the risks, even in production situations. The replication now available, for example, allows active-passive failover without a lot of effort. Even if only a few projects within an organization are appropriate for MySQL, the money saved can be quite substantial. You have to be careful about negative claims, too. Epicentric, a portal-software company, claims that MySQL is a security risk if used in production installations of their product, but if you look closely at the claim you see that the problem actually lies with the way in which Epicentric chooses to handle the deletion of user accounts.