The most popular relational database manager is installed on 11 million servers in 2009.
Acquired by Sun in 2008 he became after the takeover by Oracle of Sun, ownership of the former, and one wonders about its future.
Brief history
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.
The company was acquired by Sun on February 26 2008. Which was itself acquired by Oracle on 20 April 2009.
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.
Licensing
It is an open source software under GPL 2, but it is dual-licensed. Using it is free except when choosing to purchase a proprietary license.
These other licenses allow you to integrate it in various software whose license is not compatible with GPL.
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.
Database engines
Lot of engines may be used by the system. Including:
- MyISAM. The default engine.
- InnoDB. More powerful.
- BerkeleyDB.
And many others.
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 on the subject ...
Creators of MySQL are no longer at Sun says Michael Widenius, the creator of MySQL. He proposed the creation of a "Fedora" for MySQL, an independent project free of any commercial attaches.