The rise of MySQL within the net period

MySQL’s origin story is rooted within the early open supply motion. In 1995, Swedish developer Michael “Monty” Widenius created MySQL as an inside mission, releasing it to the general public quickly after. By 2000, MySQL was absolutely open sourced (GPL license), and its recognition exploded. Because the database part of the LAMP stack, MySQL supplied an irresistible mixture for net builders: It was free, simple to put in, and “ok” to again dynamic web sites. In an period dominated by costly proprietary databases, MySQL’s arrival was completely timed. Net startups of the 2000s—Fb, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and numerous others—embraced MySQL to retailer person knowledge and content material. MySQL rapidly turned synonymous with constructing web sites.

Early MySQL gained traction regardless of some trade-offs. In its youth, MySQL lacked sure “enterprise” options (like full SQL compliance or transactions in its default engine), however this simplicity was a function, not a bug, for a lot of customers. It made MySQL blazingly quick for reads and easy queries and simpler to handle for newcomers. Builders might get a MySQL database working with minimal fuss—a distinction to heavier techniques like Oracle and even PostgreSQL on the time. “It’s onerous to compete with simple,” I observed in 2022.

By the mid-2000s, MySQL was all over the place and was more and more feature-rich. The database had matured (including InnoDB, a extra strong storage engine for transactions) and continued to trip the online explosion. At the same time as newer databases emerged, MySQL remained a default selection for hundreds of thousands of deployments, from small enterprise functions to large-scale net infrastructure. As of 2025, MySQL is probably going nonetheless the widest-deployed open supply (or proprietary) database globally by sheer quantity of installations. Scads of functions have been written with MySQL because the backing retailer, and lots of stay in lively use. On this sense, MySQL in the present day is a bit like IBM’s DB2: a workhorse database with a large put in base that isn’t disappearing, even when it’s now not the trendiest selection.