What is MySQL? Why Is It So Popular Relational Database?

Quite illustrative, isn’t it? It is rather understandable, with the big names amongst MySQL users including Paypal, Cisco, LinkedIn, Adobe, Amazon, Verizon, Google, Dropbox, Facebook, Booking.com, Twitter, Youtube and Flikr, and app platforms add Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, phpBB and many others, no wonder MySQL is so popular. 

All the AMP open-source web application software stacks, and “Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python” (LAMP stack), have MySQL as their central part. Their open-source nature and vast multi platform support, and MySQL’s own too, brought all these products to the absolute dominance on the small-to-medium market wing.

Some History

MySQL, along with its straightforward logical approach, simplicity and usability, spiced with rigid reliability alike Volvos and SAABs, was born in Uppsala, Sweden. MySQL AB, responsible for its creation and development, was formed by Michael “Monty” Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson. Initially developed for personal use, loosely based on proprietary mSQL, MySQL had seen its first release in 1995. 

The product was successful and the company grew; at its peak MySQL AB was one of the biggest open-source companies with around 400 employees, 70% of which worked from own homes in 25 countries.

In 2008 the company was acquired by Sun Microsystems for a billion USD as one of the last Sun’s acquisitions before it had been purchased by Oracle Corporation in 2010. Monty Widenius had started a campaign against Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL, but it eventually failed, the merge was complete and Oracle promised to further develop and enhance MySQL.

What Does It Offer?

• Top MySQL features count:
• Wide cross-platform support
• Unicode and SSL support
• Native storage engines InnoDB, MyISAM.
• ACID compliance when using InnoDB and NDB Cluster Storage Engines
• Triggers, Cursors and Updatable views
• Query caching and full-text indexing and searching
• And many others

Minor updates are released every two month, the sources are available on both the native MySQL site and their GitHub repository.

Mind you, when we say cross-platform in reference to MySQL we really mean:

AIX, BSDi, FreeBSD, HP-UX, eComStation, i5/OS, IRIX, Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, NetBSD, Novell NetWare, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, OS/2 Warp, QNX, Oracle Solaris, Symbian, SunOS, OpenVMS, SCO OpenServer, SCO UnixWare, Sanos and Tru64.

Quite a bunch, isn’t it?

Scale

MySQL had started as a small task project, but eventually it evolved. Largely. Modern days MySQL is capable of fulfilling tasks of small to medium scale not breaking a sweat, but it also has serious capabilities of managing much bigger assignments. 

The impressive list of its famous user shows it clearly. MySQL server can be scaled in two ways: scale up – by increasing single server power and scale out – by increasing the number of servers. In the latter type one server, the master, is dedicated to all the writing operations, and coordinates the work of all the other “slave” servers, that are handling all the reading operations. 

The data exchange between all of them is constant, and any of the “slaves” may be promoted to “master” in case of troubles with the initial one, that dramatically decreases down-times.

GUI

MySQL is famous for its ease of use, yet surely an interface is needed. The open nature of MySQL had spawned quite a number of third party front-ends in addition to their own official one. So not full list of MySQL GUIs reads:

• MySQL Workbench – the official integrated environment for MySQL. Developed by MySQL AB, it allows users to administer MySQL databases and design database structures using visual graphical tools. The package is available in both GPL Community Edition and in a more advanced proprietary Standard Edition.
• Adminer (formerly known as phpMinAdmin) is a free MySQL front end by Jakub Vrána for managing content in MySQL (PostgreSQL and couple other) databases. It is distributed under the Apache license (or GPL v2), and is represented as a single PHP file. 
• Database Workbench by Upscene Productions. Databases Workbench supports multiple database systems, includes cross database tools and thus provides single GUI for multiple project if needed.
• DBEdit – a cross-platform database editor supporting Oracle, DB2, MySQL and any JDBC driver providing DB.DBEdit is free, open source and is hosted on SourceForge under GNU licence.
• LibreOffice Base and OpenOffice.org Base both provide MySQL support.
• Many other…

Bottom line

A few years passed after Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL and as we can see they did keep their promise. Oracle is known for their superb modernistic and flexible support service, and now it has special bundles of support plans for MySQL too. 

MySQL had proven itself as the king of the hill of relational databases in its over twenty year history in all the small to middle applications, but its development brought it to the upmarket solution as well. All around great choice by any standard.

Max Hornostaiev, CTO of Erminesoft, an app development company. Having more than 10 years of experience in IT field, he is sure the key for growth is constant self-development, learning new things and knowledge sharing.