i5/OS doesn’t immediately strike you as the most natural environment for running MySQL, but in fact, there some advantages and benefits of making use of the hardware and i5/OS environment. The System i environment used with i5/OS is scalable, and the i5/OS itself provides lots of benefits over the control and separate of work. Obviously another key advantage is that if you are already using i5/OS for your application, then being able to plug in MySQL into that equation on the same machine makes a big difference. For those companies and organizations that already have a business application on their server, you can use MySQL in combination with ODBC or more direct interfaces such as PHP to provide a web interface to your business application all in the same box. MySQL works through PASE (Portable Application Solutions Environment) which allows AIX applications to run directly on i5/OS through a direct application binary interface. As a supported platform for MySQL 5.0 we obviously have instructions for installing MySQL into your i5/OS environment. Once installed, MySQL on i5/OS works just like any other MySQL installation. However, if you want a more complete view of the support, environment, and deployment of MySQL on i5/OS and more detailed instructions for setting PASE and your system to accept MySQL, then check out the IBM Redbook Discovering MySQL on IBM i5/OS.