## 7.6. Making Comparisons

Like many applications, MySQL has a test suite that verifies that a newly compiled system does indeed support all of the features it is supposed to support. MySQL called their test suite "crash-me" because one of the things it was designed to do is attempt to crash the database server.

Somewhere along the way, someone noticed that "crash-me" was a portable program. Not only could it work on different operating systems, but you could use it to test different database engines. Since that discovery, "crash-me" has evolved from a simple test suite to a comparison program. The tests encompass all of standard SQL as well as extensions offered by many servers. In addition, the program tests the reliability of the server under stress. A complete test run gives a thorough picture of the capabilities of that database engine.

You can use "crash-me" to compare two or more database engines online. The "crash-me" page is http://www.mysql.com/crash-me-choose.htmy.

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