MySQL: Understanding What It Is and How It’s Used

MySQL is an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) that’s used to store and manage data. Its reliability, performance, scalability, and ease of use make MySQL a popular choice for developers. In fact, you’ll find it at the heart of demanding, high-traffic applications such as Facebook, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Shopify, and Booking.com.

Although MySQL rose to prominence nearly three decades ago, it shows no sign of fading and ranks as the second most popular database overall, second only to Oracle Database, according to DB-Engines. MySQL is versatile enough to underpin a wide variety of applications, from small personal projects to enterprise-level, business-critical systems, and it’s backed by a large and enthusiastic open source community.

Let’s dig into what else is behind MySQL’s enduring popularity.

What Is MySQL?

MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database management system. Databases are the essential data repositories for all software applications. For example, whenever someone conducts a web search, logs into an account, or completes a transaction, a database stores the information so it can be accessed in the future. MySQL excels at this task.

SQL, which stands for Structured Query Language, is a programming language that’s used to retrieve, update, delete, and otherwise manipulate data in relational databases. MySQL is officially pronounced “My ess-cue-el,” but “my sequel” is a common variation. As the name suggests, MySQL is a SQL-based relational database designed to store and manage structured data. In recent years, however, Oracle added additional support, including for the popular JSON data type.

Key Takeaways

• In 2024, MySQL retains its mantle as the world’s most popular open source database.
• As a relational database system, MySQL stores data in rows and columns defined by schemas.
• MySQL derives part of its name from the SQL language, which is used for managing and querying data in databases.
• MySQL offers full ACID transactions and can handle a high volume of concurrent connections.

MySQL Explained

MySQL is an open source RDBMS that uses SQL to create and manage databases. As a relational database, MySQL stores data in tables of rows and columns organized into schemas. A schema defines how data is organized and stored and describes the relationship among various tables. With this format, developers can easily store, retrieve, and analyze many data types, including simple text, numbers, dates, times, and, more recently, JSON and vectors.

Because MySQL is open source, it includes numerous features developed in close cooperation with a community of users over almost 30 years. Two capabilities that developers rely on are MySQL’s support for ACID transactions and MySQL’s ability to scale. ACID stands for “atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability,” the four properties that ensure database transactions are processed dependably and accurately. With ACID transactions, MySQL can guarantee that all data modifications are made in a consistent and reliable way, even in the event of a system failure. MySQL can be scaled out to support very large databases, and it can handle a high volume of concurrent connections.

MySQL’s performance, ease of use, and low cost combined with its ability to reliably scale as a business grows have made it the world’s most popular open source database.

MySQL: Distinguishing It from SQL

The acronym “SQL” stands for Structured Query Language, a type of programming language that’s used for manipulating data in a database. MySQL uses the SQL language to manage and query data in databases and, hence, uses the acronym as part of its name. If you’ve got data stored in a MySQL RDBMS, then you can write simple SQL prompts to add, search, analyze, and retrieve data.

Understanding MySQL: Features and Popularity

MySQL’s ability to efficiently store and analyze vast quantities of data means it can help with tasks as varied as informing complex business decisions and finding a local restaurant for a date night. Here’s a look at the top functionality that makes MySQL so pervasive in today’s tech landscape.

A Comprehensive Relational Database System

MySQL is known as a flexible, easy-to-use database management system. You’ll find it used by lone developers grabbing an open source database for a small project all the way up to the world’s most visited websites and applications. MySQL has been evolving to keep up with demand for nearly 30 years and offers ACID transactions that ensure data modifications are made in a consistent way—even when supporting a high volume of concurrent connections.

The Open Source Advantage of MySQL

MySQL is open source, which means anyone can download MySQL software from the internet and use it without cost. Organizations can also change its source code to suit their needs. MySQL software uses the GNU General Public License (GPL), which is a common set of rules for defining what may or may not be done with or to the software in various situations. If an organization feels uncomfortable with the GNU GPL or wishes to embed MySQL code into a commercial application, it can buy a commercially licensed version. See the MySQL Legal Policies page for more information about licensing.

Why Developers Prefer MySQL’s Performance and Flexibility

MySQL is known for being easy to set up and use, yet reliable and scalable enough for organizations with very large data sets and vast numbers of users. MySQL’s native replication architecture enables organizations such as Facebook to scale applications to support billions of users.

Other key factors in MySQL’s popularity include abundant learning resources and the software’s vibrant global community.

How Does MySQL Work?

Each software application needs a repository to store data so the information can be accessed, updated, and analyzed in the future. A relational database such as MySQL stores data in separate tables rather than putting all the data in one big storeroom. The database structure is organized into files optimized so data can be accessed quickly. This logical data model, with objects such as data tables, views, rows, and columns, offers developers and database administrators a flexible programming environment. They can set up rules governing the relationships between different data fields, such as one to one, one to many, unique, required, or optional, and add “pointers” among different tables. The system enforces these rules so that, with a well-designed database, an application never sees data that’s inconsistent, duplicated, orphaned, or out of date.

MySQL Database is a client/server system that consists of a multithreaded SQL server that supports different back ends, several client programs and libraries, a choice of administrative tools, and a wide variety of application programming interfaces (APIs). MySQL is available as an embedded multithreaded library that developers can link into applications to get a smaller, faster, easier-to-manage standalone product.

SQL is the most common standardized programming language used to access databases. Depending on the programming environment, a developer might enter SQL directly—for example, to generate reports. It’s also possible to embed SQL statements into code written in another programming language or use a language-specific API that hides the SQL syntax.

Why Is MySQL Important?

MySQL is important because of its ubiquitousness and the fundamental role of databases as the amount of data both grows exponentially and fuels AI. MySQL underpins a vast array of websites and applications and helps businesses worldwide organize, analyze, and protect their data.

Other factors also help maintain MySQL’s enduring popularity.

• Open source with strong community support

  During MySQL’s nearly three decades as the leading open source RDBMS, a vibrant global community has grown up around it. That’s important because the community provides a wealth of expertise and resources, such as tutorials, tips in forums, and more. By testing the software in multiple use case scenarios, the community also has helped discover and fix bugs, making MySQL highly reliable.

  The open source community’s knowledge sharing, problem-solving, and continuous innovation keep MySQL users at the forefront of technological advancements.

• High performance and reliability

  MySQL is at home in many different environments, including individual developer projects and mission-critical applications that demand unwavering stability. The open source RDBMS can handle high volumes of data and concurrent connections and provide uninterrupted operations under demanding circumstances. This is partly due to MySQL’s robust replication and failover mechanisms, which help minimize the risk of data loss.

• Ease of use and compatibility

  MySQL is often praised for being easy to use and for offering broad compatibility with technology platforms and programming languages, including Java, Python, PHP, and JavaScript. MySQL also supports replication from one release to the next, so an application running MySQL 5.7 can easily replicate to MySQL 8.0.

  In addition, MySQL offers flexibility in developing both traditional SQL and NoSQL schema-free database applications. This means developers can mix and match relational data and JSON documents in the same database and application.

• Cost-effectiveness and scalability

  Because MySQL is open source, it’s freely available to use at no cost, beyond the on-premises hardware it runs on and training on how to use it. For the latter, a global community of MySQL users provide cost-effective access to learning resources and troubleshooting expertise. Oracle also offers a wide range of training courses.

  When it’s time to scale out, MySQL supports multithreading to handle large amounts of data efficiently. Automated failover features help reduce the potential costs of unplanned downtime.

Benefits of MySQL

MySQL is fast, reliable, scalable, and easy to use. It was originally developed to handle large databases quickly and has been used in highly demanding production environments for many years. MySQL offers a rich and useful set of functions, and it’s under constant development by Oracle, so it keeps up with new technological and business demands. MySQL’s connectivity, speed, and security make it highly suited for accessing databases on the internet.

MySQL’s key benefits include the following:

• Ease of use. Developers can install MySQL in minutes, and the database is easy to manage.
• Reliability. MySQL is one of the most mature and widely used databases. It has been tested in a wide variety of scenarios for nearly 30 years, including by many of the world’s largest companies. Organizations depend on MySQL to run business-critical applications because of its reliability.
• Scalability. MySQL scales to meet the demands of the most accessed applications. MySQL’s native replication architecture enables organizations, including Facebook, Netflix, and Uber, to scale applications to support tens of millions of users or more.
• Performance. MySQL is a proven high performance, zero-administration database system and comes in a range of editions to meet nearly any demand. Cloud-based HeatWave MySQL provides unmatched performance and price-performance, according to industry benchmarks including TPC-H, TPC-DS, and CH-benCHmark.
• High availability. MySQL delivers a complete set of native, fully integrated replication technologies for high availability and disaster recovery. For business-critical applications and service level agreement commitments, customers can achieve recovery point objective zero (zero data loss) and recovery time objective zero seconds (automatic failover).
• Security. Data security entails both data protection and compliance with industry and government regulations, including the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Security Technical Implementation Guides. MySQL Enterprise Edition provides advanced security features, including authentication/authorization, transparent data encryption, auditing, data masking, and a database firewall.
• Flexibility. The MySQL Document Store gives users maximum flexibility in developing traditional SQL and NoSQL schema-free database applications. Developers can mix and match relational data and JSON documents in the same database and application.

What Is HeatWave MySQL?

HeatWave is an in-memory query accelerator for MySQL Database. HeatWave MySQL is the only MySQL cloud database service that offers such acceleration and that combines transactions with real-time analytics, eliminating the complexity, latency, cost, and risk of extract, transform, and load (ETL) duplication.

As a result, users can see orders-of-magnitude increases in MySQL performance for analytics and mixed workloads. In addition, HeatWave AutoML lets developers and data analysts build, train, deploy, and explain the outputs of machine learning models within HeatWave MySQL in a fully automated way. They can also benefit from integrated and automated generative AI using HeatWave GenAI.

Watch: What Is HeatWave MySQL? (3:16)

Key Features of HeatWave MySQL

HeatWave MySQL can help improve MySQL query performance significantly and enables organizations to access real-time analytics on their transactional data without moving it to a separate analytics database. You can enhance data security and deploy HeatWave MySQL-powered applications in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Microsoft Azure.

HeatWave MySQL is the only MySQL cloud service integrating HeatWave, an in-memory, massively parallel, hybrid columnar query-processing engine. It’s also the only MySQL cloud service built on MySQL Enterprise Edition. Advanced features provide additional security measures to help companies protect data throughout its lifecycle and address regulatory requirements. Additionally, the built-in HeatWave Autopilot automatically helps improve MySQL performance and reduce costs with machine learning-powered automation, without requiring database tuning expertise. Autopilot can help increase the productivity of developers and DBAs and help reduce human error.

HeatWave MySQL also enables you to take advantage of a wider set of integrated HeatWave capabilities, including:

• HeatWave Lakehouse. Query data in object storage in various file formats, including CSV, Parquet, Avro, and JSON. Export files from other databases using standard SQL syntax and optionally combine it with transactional data in MySQL databases.
• HeatWave AutoML. Quickly and easily build, train, deploy, and explain machine learning models within HeatWave MySQL. There’s no need to move data to a separate machine learning cloud service, and no need to be a machine learning expert.
• HeatWave GenAI. Gain integrated and automated generative AI with in-database large language models (LLMs); an automated, in-database vector store; scale-out vector processing; and the ability to have contextual conversations in natural language. Now companies can take advantage of generative AI without AI expertise, data movement, or additional costs.

MySQL Use Cases

MySQL use cases include managing customer and product data for ecommerce websites, helping content management systems serve web content, securely tracking transactions and financial data, and powering social networking sites by storing user profiles and interactions.

MySQL’s ability to handle large data sets and complex queries makes it a key technology across industries and use cases, including the following:

• Ecommerce. Many of the world’s largest ecommerce applications—including Uber and Booking.com—run their transactional systems on MySQL. It’s a popular choice for managing user profiles, credentials, user content, and financial data, including payments, along with fraud detection.
• Social platforms. Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn are among the world’s largest social networks, and they all rely on MySQL.
• Content management. Unlike single-purpose document databases, MySQL enables both SQL and NoSQL with a single database. The MySQL Document Store enables CRUD operations and harnesses the power of SQL to query data from JSON documents for reporting and analytics.
• SaaS and ISVs. More than 2,000 ISVs, OEMs, and VARs, including Ericsson and IBM, rely on MySQL as the embedded database to make their applications, hardware, and appliances more competitive; bring products to market faster; and lower their cost of goods sold. MySQL is also the database behind popular SaaS applications, such as Zendesk. Other popular applications using MySQL include apps for online gaming, digital marketing, retail point-of-sale systems, and Internet of Things monitoring systems.
• On-premises applications with MySQL Enterprise Edition. MySQL Enterprise Edition includes the most comprehensive set of advanced features along with management tools and technical support, enabling organizations to achieve the highest levels of MySQL scalability, security, reliability, and uptime. It reduces the risk, cost, and complexity in developing, deploying, and managing business-critical MySQL applications. It provides security features, including MySQL Enterprise Backup, Monitor, Firewall, Audit, Transparent Data Encryption, and Authentication, to help customers protect data and achieve regulatory and industry compliance.

MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database and is second among all databases, behind only Oracle Database, for a reason. It’s reliable and fast, with performance that thousands of websites and applications depend on. It can handle a large amount of data and queries without slowing down. It boasts a large and enthusiastic open source community. All that plus low cost and ease of use make MySQL a top choice for many developers and businesses.

MySQL FAQs

What is MySQL and why is it used?

MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database. Developers and database administrators use MySQL in their applications and to store, update, and analyze data.

What is the difference between SQL and MySQL?

SQL, which stands for Structured Query Language, is a programming language designed to manage and analyze data stored in databases. MySQL is a database management system that gets part of its name from SQL and uses SQL to manage data in databases.

Is there a cloud version of MySQL?

HeatWave MySQL is a fully managed database service, and the only cloud service built on MySQL Enterprise Edition. It provides advanced security features for encryption, data masking, authentication, and a database firewall. HeatWave improves MySQL query performance by orders of magnitude and enables real-time analytics on transactional data in MySQL without the complexity, latency, risks, and cost of ETL duplication to a separate analytics database. It’s available on OCI, AWS, and Microsoft Azure.

How does MySQL compare to other databases?

MySQL is an open source relational database. That means it stores data in rows and columns and defines relationships between those rows and columns in schemas. There are other popular relational databases that aren’t open source, such as Oracle Database, as well as popular databases that aren’t relational databases. These include NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB.