Educational institutions develop and deploy a wide range of applications that require databases. Elementary schools use assessment and instruction systems to create personalized learning paths. Universities need applications to automate the admissions process, tuition payments, and degree audits. Research institutes need to provide scientists and researchers with a wealth of online information resources to foster innovation. Numerous ISVs are addressing the needs of educational institutions with packaged software applications.

Schools and universities are under constant budgetary pressure and so must look to these applications to help them cut costs. An application's database can often be its highest cost component, especially when considering its total costs over time. Therefore, educational ISVs are turning to MySQL as a cost-effective database solution to help reduce their COGS (Cost of Goods Sold).

Using MySQL, educational software makers can create high performance, reliable applications that automate many of the academic and administrative processes. If you are developing any of these in-house or for resale, MySQL provides the following benefits:

• Reduced COGS and Improved Profitability by using a highly cost efficient database that allows vendors to offer education applications at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions. MySQL's lower costs provide margin flexibility, so pricing can be more easily set to match the education industry's budgetary volatility.
• Multi-Platform Support MySQL supports over 20 platforms making it ideal for the education industry in which a wide variety of platforms are used, including Mac OS, Windows, and increasingly Linux. Platform flexibility allows education solution providers to more easily extend the size of their addressable markets.
• Ease of Installation, Configuration and Use so schools needn't hire database experts to get a complete solution up and running quickly using an out-of-the box configuration.
• Zero Administration eliminating the need to hire-in costly database administration skills to maintain the database, which is particularly valuable for smaller schools, which may lack full-time IT support.
• High Reliability so all of the data is captured at all times to meet regulatory requirements.
• High Performance to meet the heavy data storage, retrieval and analysis demands of higher education and research institutes.

White Papers

• White Paper: Guide to Choosing an Embedded Database
• White Paper: "A Visual Guide to Installing MySQL in Windows Applications"

Other Resources

• Why Product Managers Choose MySQL (ISV)
• Why Engineering VPs Choose MySQL (ISV)
• MySQL as an Embedded Database
• ISV / OEM Customers
• ISV / OEM Resources