One of the main features that are unique to MySQL is that of pluggable storage engines. The most common ones are MYISAM for speed, InnoDB for transactions as well as ARCHIVE, CVS etc that can help with different problems. There are a few newer engines that people may not know about including Falcon (still alpha), PBXT and the SolidDB storage engine (by Solid Information Technology (www.solidtech.com).
Well, the SolidDB storage engine is one that I have been looking at recently as it supposedly scales very well due to multithreaded implementation and architectural design. I wanted to check the benchmarks and went to the website to find that the only binaries were for Linux and MS Windows. They did offer source however and I tried to compile MySQL with SolidDB storage engine support for Mac OS X (PPC) platform.