MySQL

The most popular relational database manager is installed on million servers. This includes Youtube, Flickr, Facebook (partially beside Cassandra).

MySQL was created in 1995 by David Axmark, Allan Larsson and Michael Widenius who founded the company MySQL AB to market it.
In June 2000 it passed under the GPL but it remains dual-licensed and it is possible to purchase a proprietary license especially to integrate it in other software whose license is not compatible with GPL.
The company was acquired by Sun on February 26 2008. Whan it was itself acquired by Oracle on 20 April 2009, MySQL got a new owner.

Design

MySQL is optimized for reading, it is well suited for the Web where viewing pages is more frequent than their creation or update.
It supports concurrent requests for multiple users (unlike for example, SQLite which can process only one at a time).
It is compatible with SQL2 and the procedural language PL/SQL since version 5.

MySQL is often used in conjunction with MemCached, a program that maintains the database in memory to speed up transactions. Large sites like Facebook, Twitter do use it. It is available for Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal.

Lot of storage engines may be used by the system whose purpose is to manage the creating and deleting of data in the base, and the corresponding storage in the file system:

• MyISAM. The initial default engine.
• InnoDB. More powerful, bought by Oracle in October 2005, became the default engine starting with version 5.5.
• BerkeleyDB. Was bought by Oracle in February 2006, obsolete since MySQL 5.1.
• And many others.

Programming

Most programming languages can be used to access the DBMS, so to make requests. The most commonly used languages are PHP and Java.
The M first letter MySQL gives a letter to LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), a popular server system of websites.

The future of MySQL

After the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, a database company that has in MySQL, which is a free product, a competitor to its paid products, how can be the future of MySQL?
Here is the opinion of the creator of MySQL, Michael Widenius, about that: To be free ot not to be free.

He proposed the creation of a "Fedora" for MySQL, an independent project free of any commercial attaches.
Actually, some forks were created that try to maintain compatibility:

• MariaDB. From the creator of MySQL. Derived from MySQL 5.1. Use InnoDB or XtraDB.
• Drizzle. MySQL lightweiht for the cloud. Derived from MySQL 6.0 that was in development.
• Percona Server. Uses the XtraDB storage engine.
• OurDelta. A superset of MySQL.

As MySQL is becoming more and more commercial, these alternatives will eventually replace it. At $2000 per server per year, this may become inevitable.

Sites and tools

• MySQL
• phpMyAdmin. Interface to manage online a database. This may be done also from LibreOffice,
• HeidiSQL. Work locally and can manage a remote database. (Windows).

Documents

• MySQL faster then NoSQL?
• NoSQL. The other design, still in SQL.