With the many business and government organizations that now use open source software such as Linux, it's becoming increasingly clear that price is not the only advantage such software holds. If it were, companies that adopted it during the Great Recession would surely have switched back to the expensive proprietary stuff as soon as conditions began to ease, and that's clearly not the case.

Rather, free and open source software (FOSS) holds numerous other compelling advantages for businesses, some of them even more valuable than the software's low price. Need a few examples? Let's start counting.

According to Forrester Research, the amount of data businesses retain for analytic purposes is growing at a rate of 50% per year, and in some industries such as Web, ecommerce, retail, telecommunications and government, the growth rate is even higher. Just a few years ago, the data used for business intelligence purposes was stored in a centralized data warehouse and a few departmental data marts. But now, the skyrocketing demand for better business intelligence data has created a vast array of distributed data repositories that run throughout organizations, which has resulted in increased complexity and costs for businesses wishing to maximize their use of analytic data.

To mitigate these issues, leading modern businesses such as Los Alamos National Labs, MIT Lincoln Lab, Cox Communications, and others have selected MySQL to power their growing data warehouse infrastructure. The growth of MySQL in the area of data warehousing recently prompted Gartner Group to include MySQL in their 2006 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS Servers.