With its January 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle gained the MySQL open source database management software (DBMS) platform for enterprise IT environments. MySQL is designed to let users ...

MySQL MySQL, not affiliated with Microsoft SQL Server, is a relational database management system that allows you to store information in multiple tables that have relationships.

As a MySQL developer, you should be at least dimly aware that MySQL supports several database formats. Find out what each is good for and how you use them.

MySQL is the second most popular database in use, according the DB-Engines Ranking, and is a key element of the LAMP — Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, PHP — open-source web development stack.

Until now, it has sold support services for a competing open-source database, PostgreSQL. MySQL is one of the most successful open-source companies founded in the past five years.

If you still think MySQL is too entrenched to be moved from its spot as the number one, open-source DBMS, you might to look at what Wikipedia is doing.

Once the main go-to database for developers, MySQL has lost ground to Postgres and other specialized databases.

MySQL is still usually used in small to medium-sized deployments, although it now supports “big database” features such as master-slave deployments, use with Memcached, and horizontal sharding.