A few months ago we wrote a mammoth we application which had an SQL Express DB. We used stored procedures, and after writing 170 of them(I didn’t write all of them of course), I was quite used to the way that variables and so on worked in SQL Server.
We’ve started a new project where the DB is MySQL 5. Again we are using stored procedures, but variables work differently.
Setting a variable in SQL Server
DECLARE @oldPageGUID uniqueidentifier;
SET @oldPageGUID = (SELECT mPage.id FROM mPage WHERE mPage.title = @passedtitle);
Setting a variable in MySQL Server
DECLARE dateAdded TIMESTAMP;
SELECT lusers.dateadded INTO dateAdded FROM lusers WHERE lusers.id= id;
You can see that setting the value of the variable is done completely differently (MySQL Docs for SELECT … INTO Statement). Two other things that confused me for a while was that there is no character prefixed to the variables in MySQL as in SQL server (@) and that there is no uniqueidentifier data-type for GUIDs
I’m not big into hardware and only really know what I need to. I’m not a gamer and have no need for any fancy graphics cards. I do however spend hours trawling ebay for servers. I am dying to buy one and I think the time has come. I had been looking at the 
I can justify the cost of this as I already pay about $150 a year to dreamhost so after a couple of years it will have paid for itself. Karova will be getting some major server space soon and I hope to sneak the 1u server in there. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll have a awesome dev server I can screw into the bottom of my desk.