Today, however, the computing environment does not stay still for long. With the advent of large-scale Internet collaboration, no project is beyond the reach of a dedicated base of programmers. By 1996, other cheap SQL implementations -- one of which is MySQL -- were appearing on the scene. mSQL was no longer alone.

Throughout the 1990s, Hughes has been developing and improving mSQL. The database engine, however, eventually reached the point where further development required some extensive rethinking of the entire project. Such a huge undertaking was bound to take a great deal of time as any new project has its share of new bugs and setbacks. During this time, it would also be necessary to maintain the existing product. mSQL 2 was thus born as the new rebuild of the mSQL engine while the existing product, mSQL 1, continued to be maintained.

mSQL 2 came along when the initial product was beginning to show its age. Stability problems and lack of important functionality, such as the support of important datatypes, were leading people to look for other solutions like MySQL. mSQL 2 provided fixes for a large range of bugs that plagued later releases of mSQL 1 and added a host of new features while remaining true to its original design goals. The subset of ANSI SQL supported by mSQL grew and a number of new datatypes were added. The indexing feature was reworked to provide much more powerful table indexing.

The major changes between mSQL 1 and 2 are: