Ever since computers emerged on the general consumer market, technology wars have existed. PCs vs. Macs, Windows vs. MacOS vs. Linux, Intel vs. AMD, ATi vs. nVidia and of course, in the geekier world of programming languages and server systems, we have our own wars. There is a common trend among all these wars: no one tends to win. Sure, some gain market share, some lose market share and then gain it back, but rarely someone fully destroys the competition.

This is also the case with ASP.NET and SQL Server versus PHP and MySQL, and since the competition is quite high in this case, the consumers are the winners. I'm a ferm believe that you should always use the right tool for the job so as you might've guessed, there will be no winner in this article, just a comparison of what the ASP.NET and SQL Server is better at or more inferior at than the PHP and MySQL combination. As a web developer myself, I use both combinations successfully in my projects, depending on the project type, size, budget and a few other, less important, factors.

In this set of two articles we are going to look at ASP.NET and SQL Server, followed by PHP and MySQL. This will allow you to contrast the two, and if you use either one of them right now, or perhaps none, help you make a decision over the next move in your web development career.

Part 1: A Look at ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server