MySQL () is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius' daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database organizes data into one or more data tables in which data may be related to each other; these relations help structure the data. SQL is a language that programmers use to create, modify and extract data from the relational database, as well as control user access to the database. In addition to relational databases and SQL, an RDBMS like MySQL works with an operating system to implement a relational database in a computer's storage system, manages users, allows for network access and facilitates testing database integrity and creation of backups.
MySQL is free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and is also available under a variety of proprietary licenses. MySQL was owned and sponsored by the Swedish company MySQL AB, which was bought by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation). In 2010, when Oracle acquired Sun, Widenius forked the open-source MySQL project to create MariaDB.
MySQL has stand-alone clients that allow users to interact directly with a MySQL database using SQL, but more often, MySQL is used with other programs to implement applications that need relational database capability. MySQL is a component of the LAMP web application software stack (and others), which is an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python. MySQL is used by many database-driven web applications, including Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, and WordPress. MySQL is also used by many popular websites, including Facebook, Flickr, MediaWiki, Twitter, and YouTube.
Overview MySQL is written in C and C++. Its SQL parser is written in yacc, but it uses a home-brewed lexical analyzer. MySQL works on many system platforms, including IBM AIX, BSDi, FreeBSD, HP-UX, ArcaOS, eComStation, IBM i, IRIX, Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, NetBSD, Novell NetWare, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, OS/2 Warp, QNX, Oracle Solaris, Symbian, SunOS, SCO OpenServer, SCO UnixWare, Sanos and Tru64. A port of MySQL to OpenVMS also exists.
The MySQL server software itself and the client libraries use dual-licensing distribution. They are offered under GPL version 2, or a proprietary license.
Support can be obtained from the official manual. Free support additionally is available in different IRC channels and forums. Oracle offers paid support via its MySQL Enterprise products. They differ in the scope of services and in price. Additionally, a number of third party organisations exist to provide support and services.
MySQL has received positive reviews, and reviewers noticed it "performs extremely well in the average case" and that the "developer interfaces are there, and the documentation (not to mention feedback in the real world via Web sites and the like) is very, very good". It has also been tested to be a "fast, stable and true multi-user, multi-threaded SQL database server".
History
MySQL was created by a Swedish company, MySQL AB, founded by Swedes David Axmark and Allan Larsson, along with Finn Michael "Monty" Widenius. Original development of MySQL by Widenius and Axmark began in 1994. The first version of MySQL appeared on 23 May 1995. It was initially created for personal usage from mSQL based on the low-level language ISAM, which the creators considered too slow and inflexible. They created a new SQL interface, while keeping the same API as mSQL. By keeping the API consistent with the mSQL system, many developers were able to use MySQL instead of the (proprietarily licensed) mSQL antecedent.
Milestones Additional milestones in MySQL development included: First internal release on 23 May 1995 Version 3.19: End of 1996, from www.tcx.se Version 3.20: January 1997 Windows version was released on 8 January 1998 for Windows 95 and NT Version 3.21: production release 1998, from www.mysql.com Version 3.22: alpha, beta from 1998 Version 3.23: beta from June 2000, production release 22 January 2001 Version 4.0: beta from August 2002, production release March 2003 (unions). Version 4.1: beta from June 2004, production release October 2004 (R-trees and B-trees, subqueries, prepared statements). Version 5.0: beta from March 2005, production release October 2005 (cursors, stored procedures, triggers, views, XA transactions). The developer of the Federated Storage Engine states that "The Federated Storage Engine is a proof-of-concept storage engine", but the main distributions of MySQL version 5.0 included it and turned it on by default. Documentation of some of the short-comings appears in "MySQL Federated Tables: The Missing Manual". Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB in 2008. Version 5.1: production release 27 November 2008 (event scheduler, partitioning, plugin API, row-based replication, server log tables) Version 5.1 contained 20 known crashing and wrong result bugs in addition to the 35 present in version 5.0 (almost all fixed as of release 5.1.51). MySQL 5.1 and 6.0-alpha showed poor performance when used for data warehousing partly due to its inability to utilize multiple CPU cores for processing a single query. Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems on 27 January 2010. The day Oracle announced the purchase of Sun, Michael "Monty" Widenius forked MySQL, launching MariaDB, and took a swath of MySQL developers with him.
MySQL Server 5.5 was generally available (). Enhancements and features include: The default storage engine is InnoDB, which supports transactions and referential integrity constraints. Improved InnoDB I/O subsystem Improved SMP support Semisynchronous replication. SIGNAL and RESIGNAL statement in compliance with the SQL standard. Support for supplementary Unicode character sets utf16, utf32, and utf8mb4. New options for user-defined partitioning. MySQL Server 6.0.11-alpha was announced on 22 May 2009 as the last release of the 6.0 line. Future MySQL Server development uses a New Release Model. Features developed for 6.0 are being incorporated into future releases. The general availability of MySQL 5.6 was announced in February 2013. New features included performance improvements to the query optimizer, higher transactional throughput in InnoDB, new NoSQL-style memcached APIs, improvements to partitioning for querying and managing very large tables, column type that correctly stores milliseconds, improvements to replication, and better performance monitoring by expanding the data available through the . The InnoDB storage engine also included support for full-text search and improved group commit performance. The general availability of MySQL 5.7 was announced in October 2015. As of MySQL 5.7.8, August 2015, MySQL supports a native JSON data type defined by RFC 7159. MySQL Server 8.0 was announced in April 2018, including NoSQL Document Store, atomic and crash safe DDL sentences and JSON Extended syntax, new functions, such as JSON table functions, improved sorting, and partial updates. Previous MySQL Server 8.0.0-dmr (Milestone Release) was announced 12 September 2016. MySQL was declared DBMS of the year 2019 from the DB-Engines ranking.
Release history Release General availability Latest minor version Latest release End of support 5.1.73 2013-12-03 Dec 2013 5.5.62 2018-10-22 Dec 2018 5.6.51 2021-01-20 Feb 2021 5.7.44 2023-10-25 Oct 2023 8.0.46 2026-04-21 Apr 2026 8.1.0 2023-07-18 Oct 2023 8.2.0 2023-10-25 Jan 2024 8.3.0 2024-01-16 Apr 2024 8.4.11 2026-07-28 Apr 2032 9.0.1 2024-07-23 Oct 2024 9.1.0 2024-10-15 Jan 2025 9.2.0 2025-01-21 Apr 2025 9.3.0 2025-04-15 Jul 2025 9.4.0 2025-07-22 Oct 2025 9.5.0 2025-10-10 Jan 2026 9.6.0 2026-01-20 Apr 2026 9.7.3 2026-07-28 Apr 2034 26.7.1 2026-07-28 Oct 2026 LTS = Long-Term Support (released every two years; support for eight years)IR = Innovation Release (released every three months; support for three months)
Work on version 6 stopped after the Sun Microsystems acquisition. The MySQL Cluster product uses version 7. The decision was made to jump to version 8 as the next major version number.
From 2023 to 2026, which included versions 8.1 to 9.7, version naming changed to include short-lived (only supported for three months) innovation releases (IR) and long-term support (LTS) versions, which are typically supported for 8 years.
As of July, 2026 (starting with version 26.7), MySQL is using calendar versioning naming convention, in the YY.M format, where YY represents the year and M represents the scheduled release month.
Legal disputes and acquisitions On 15 June 2001, NuSphere sued MySQL AB, TcX DataKonsult AB and its original authors Michael ("Monty") Widenius and David Axmark in U.S. District Court in Boston for "breach of contract, tortious interference with third party contracts and relationships and unfair competition".
In 2002, MySQL AB sued Progress NuSphere for copyright and trademark infringement in United States district court. NuSphere had allegedly violated MySQL AB's copyright by linking MySQL's GPL'ed code with NuSphere Gemini table without being in compliance with the license. After a preliminary hearing before Judge Patti Saris on 27 February 2002, the parties entered settlement talks and eventually settled. After the hearing, FSF commented that "Judge Saris made clear that she sees the GNU GPL to be an enforceable and binding license."
In October 2005, Oracle Corporation acquired Innobase OY, the Finnish company that developed the third-party InnoDB storage engine that allows MySQL to provide such functionality as transactions and foreign keys. After the acquisition, an Oracle press release mentioned that the contracts that make the company's software available to MySQL AB would be due for renewal (and presumably renegotiation) some time in 2006. During the MySQL Users Conference in April 2006, MySQL AB issued a press release that confirmed that MySQL AB and Innobase OY agreed to a "multi-year" extension of their licensing agreement.
In February 2006, Oracle Corporation acquired Sleepycat Software, makers of the Berkeley DB, a database engine providing the basis for another MySQL storage engine. This had little effect, as Berkeley DB was not widely used, and was dropped (due to lack of use) in MySQL 5.1.12, a pre-GA release of MySQL 5.1 released in October 2006.
In January 2008, Sun Microsystems bought MySQL AB for $1 billion.
In April 2009, Oracle Corporation entered into an agreement to purchase Sun Microsystems, then owners of MySQL copyright and trademark. Sun's board of directors unanimously approved the deal. It was also approved by Sun's shareholders, and by the U.S. government on 20 August 2009. On 14 December 2009, Oracle pledged to continue to enhance MySQL as it had done for the previous four years.
A movement against Oracle's acquisition of MySQL AB, to "Save MySQL" from Oracle was started by one of the MySQL AB founders, Monty Widenius. The petition of 50,000+ developers and users called upon the European Commission to block approval of the acquisition. At the same time, some Free Software opinion leaders (including Pamela Jones of Groklaw, Jan Wildeboer and Carlo Piana, who also acted as co-counsel in the merger regulation procedure) advocated for the unconditional approval of the merger. As part of the negotiations with the European Commission, Oracle committed that MySQL server will continue until at least 2015 to use the dual-licensing strategy long used by MySQL AB, with proprietary and GPL versions available. The antitrust of the EU had been "pressuring it to divest MySQL as a condition for approval of the merger". But the US Department of Justice, at the request of Oracle, pressured the EU to approve the merger unconditionally. The European Commission eventually unconditionally approved Oracle's acquisition of MySQL AB on 21 January 2010.