History of MySQL

Introduction

MySQL did not appear overnight inside a large corporation — it began as a small project built by two developers who needed a fast, reliable database of their own. Understanding where MySQL came from helps explain many of its design choices, and why it looks the way it does today.

In this lesson, you will trace MySQL's journey from its creation in the mid-1990s, through two major corporate acquisitions, to its position today as one of the most widely deployed databases on the internet.

The Birth of MySQL

MySQL was created by two Swedish developers, Michael "Monty" Widenius and David Axmark. They were working on database applications and needed something faster and simpler than the tools available at the time, so they built their own database engine.

The first version of MySQL was released in 1995. It was developed by a company called MySQL AB, founded in Sweden, and was designed from the start to be fast, reliable, and easy to use for web-style workloads — reading and writing large numbers of relatively simple records.

Where the Name Comes From

One of the most commonly asked questions about MySQL is where its name comes from. It is not an acronym in the way many people assume.

This personal touch is easy to forget once you are deep into writing queries, but it is a nice reminder that MySQL began as a small, human project rather than a corporate product designed by committee.

Early Growth as Open Source

From early on, MySQL was distributed as open-source software, meaning its source code was publicly available and free to use. This was a major reason for its rapid adoption during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

As the web grew explosively during this period, developers needed a database that was free, fast, and simple to set up. MySQL fit that need perfectly, and it became a core part of the "LAMP stack" — Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP — which powered a huge share of the early web.

Acquired by Sun Microsystems

By the mid-2000s, MySQL AB had grown into a serious company with a widely used product. In 2008, Sun Microsystems — a major hardware and software company — acquired MySQL AB for roughly one billion US dollars.

Under Sun, MySQL continued to be developed and released as open-source software, and the acquisition brought additional engineering resources to the project. However, this was only the first of two acquisitions MySQL would go through in just a few years.

Oracle and the Rise of MariaDB

In 2010, Oracle Corporation — itself a major database vendor — acquired Sun Microsystems, and with it, MySQL. This raised concerns across parts of the open-source community: Oracle was now the steward of one of its biggest commercial database competitor's open-source rivals.

In response to these concerns, Michael Widenius, one of MySQL's original creators, started a new project called MariaDB. MariaDB is a "fork" of MySQL — a new database built from MySQL's original source code, developed independently as a fully open-source alternative.

Despite the fork, MySQL itself has continued to be actively developed by Oracle, remaining free and open-source under the same licensing model, and continuing to receive major feature updates.

Major Version Milestones

MySQL has gone through many versions over the decades, but a few releases stand out as turning points in its capabilities.

MySQL 5.x, especially 5.6 and 5.7, was widely adopted across the industry for many years and still runs on countless production systems. MySQL 8.0 modernized the language significantly, adding features that make complex queries — like ranking rows or writing recursive queries — much easier to express.

MySQL Today

Today, MySQL remains one of the most popular database systems in the world, consistently ranking among the top few databases in independent industry surveys, alongside Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server.

Common Mistakes

Best Practices

Frequently Asked Questions

Key Takeaways

Summary

MySQL began in 1995 as a small open-source project by two Swedish developers and grew into one of the most important databases in computing history, surviving two corporate acquisitions along the way.

In this lesson, you learned who created MySQL, where its name comes from, how it changed hands from MySQL AB to Sun to Oracle, why MariaDB exists, and the version milestones that shaped the MySQL you will be learning in this course. Next, you will look at why MySQL is such a popular choice for developers today.