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 challenge, releasing it to the general public quickly after. By 2000, MySQL was absolutely open sourced (GPL license), and its reputation exploded. Because the database element of the LAMP stack, MySQL provided an irresistible mixture for net builders: It was free, simple to put in, and “adequate” 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 information and content material. MySQL shortly grew to become 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 characteristic, 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 may get a MySQL database working with minimal fuss—a distinction to heavier methods like Oracle and even PostgreSQL on the time. “It’s laborious to compete with simple,” I noticed in 2022.
By the mid-2000s, MySQL was in all places 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 net explosion. At the same time as newer databases emerged, MySQL remained a default alternative for tens of millions of deployments, from small enterprise purposes 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 purposes had been written with MySQL because the backing retailer, and lots of stay in energetic use. On this sense, MySQL as we speak is a bit like IBM’s DB2: a workhorse database with an enormous put in base that isn’t disappearing, even when it’s not the trendiest alternative.
