MySQL is devil spawn, it's a horrible piece of badly written software. Some people call it a Relational DBMS, it's nothing more than a glorified flat file database with an SQL interface. When it's running properly it's fast, but at the expense of any feature anyone would find useful (Think transactions, as one example). It sucks at large joins and has trouble handling tables with a few million rows in them.

If you want a database and a relational one at that, use PostgreSQL. You'll love yourself forever if you do.

WARNING: DO NOT USE MYSQL'S RAND() FUNCTION IT CAUSES YOUR DATABASE TO DISAPPEAR