Talking to a shop with their main business on SQL Server but a bunch of smaller sites on MySQL, and an interview question put to me is to compare and contrast MySQL and SQL Server, architecturally.
After a couple of hours Googling around for a while, my impression is basically that the available discussions of MySQL architecture, at least online, is minimal. It's hard to get a quick view of SQL Server architecture online as well of course, but that's because there is a lot of it!
My question here is about MySQL concurrency and use of cores. And of course any question about MySQL has to be qualified by which "engine" you are using. Do any of the engines compare to SQL Server in the sophistication of the use of concurrency between sessions, and the best use of modern multi-core servers? Does MySQL even offer any parallelism for individual queries, I don't see any mention of it.
I can see that the most recent versions of MySQL offer a feature list that at first glance approaches that of SQL Server, but I wonder just how functional a lot of those capabilities really are.
Josh
ps: msft has a recent paper comparing, but it doesn't seem to address these engine-level, architectural questions.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/5/0/B501DE4C-21AC-4CC6-90DE-B7E717294F18/SQL_Server_2012_Compared_With_MySQL_5_White_Paper_Apr2012.pdf