One of the reasons MySQL is so popular is that it runs on so many platforms. Whether you run Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, OpenSolaris, or some other platform, there is likely a matching version of MySQL. Because each of these popular platforms is unique, so are the installation procedures for them. In this section, we provide links to tutorials that details how to install MySQL on your platform of choice.

MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user, SQL Database Management System
* A broad subset of ANSI SQL 99, as well as extensions
* Cross-platform support
* Stored procedures
* Triggers
* Cursors
* updatable Views
* True VARCHAR support
* INFORMATION_SCHEMA
* Strict mode
* X/Open XA distributed transaction processing (DTP) support; two phase commit as part of this, using Oracle's InnoDB engine
* Independent storage engines (MyISAM for read speed, InnoDB for transactions and referential integrity, Archive for storing historical data in little space)
* Transactions with the InnoDB, BDB and Cluster storage engines; savepoints with InnoDB
* SSL support
* Query caching
* Sub-SELECTs (i.e. nested SELECTs)
* Replication with one master per slave, many slaves per master, no automatic support for multiple masters per slave.
* Full-text indexing and searching using MyISAM engine
* Embedded database library
* Full Unicode support
* ACID compliance using the InnoDB, BDB and Cluster engines
* Shared-nothing clustering through MySQL Cluster