MySQL is a unique adult (now 21 years old) in many ways. It supports plugins. It supports storage engines. It is also owned by Oracle, thus birthing two branches of the popular opensource database: Percona Server and MariaDB Server. It also once spawned a fork: Drizzle. Lately a consortium of web scale users (think a chunk of the top 10 sites out there) have spawned WebScaleSQL. You're a busy DBA