30 Years Of Mysql, The Database That Changed The World

Before Donald Trump became US president and the UK left the EU – both arguably the result of a new kind of online politics – a rather nervous-looking Mark Zuckerberg shuffled out onto a Harvard University lecture hall floor to offer some insight into the inner workings of a website he had created less than two years earlier.

In a December 2005 talk, he explained how his Facebook social networking site was able to support 400 million page views a day with around 50 employees, a bunch of rented servers and some open source software, including a database.

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

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“MySQL is a really good open source database right now. I don’t know if any of you mess around and make anything with MySQL, or have used it in any way, but it’s pretty easy to use, and it’s also decently quick. It’s not as fully featured as something like Oracle, but it’s pretty good,” the youthful Zuckerberg told the sparse audience.

The world is a different place now. Zuckerberg is worth around $173 billion, Facebook has approximately 3 billion active users, and its parent company, Meta, has a market cap of around $1.4 trillion, not to mention social media coming to dominate political discourse. But MySQL is still going strong and celebrates its 30th birthday this month.

Meta reportedly still uses a lot of MySQL in its various technology stacks – it declined an invitation to take part in this article – and its adoption of the open source database, which began its life in Sweden in the mid-1990s, offers a good example of why the system has become so popular.

The arrival of MySQL coincided with the dotcom boom, which heralded the arrival of technologies and businesses that, for better or worse, became known as Web 2.0. Loosely speaking, a more programmable and interactive version of its 1990s predecessor, Web 2.0 saw a flurry of organizations building systems to try to capture the millions of people flooding online in the early-to-mid Noughties. Since the dotcom bubble burst, the paucity of investment pushed them towards open source software. MySQL became the M in LAMP, the de facto standard used to build web-facing systems, which also included the Linux operating system, Apache web server, and programming languages Perl, PHP, or Python.

“Probably around 2004, I started playing with MySQL because it just became the default for when you’re getting a website to do anything online: you’re going to use MySQL, and the LAMP stack was just this kind of in-the-box, incredible tooling,” said Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale, a database company partly built around MySQL.

“My first attempt at making a product – a text message URL shortening platform – was using MySQL to store the URL mappings and send them back. It took me from that magic moment to being a DBA, and then an engineering leader,” said Lambert, who is former VP of engineering at GitHub.

“We were running MySQL behind GitHub and one of the largest websites on Earth, and it’s still thriving.”

Lambert said MySQL worked well for engineers at the time because its developers started with very clear intentions to build something that was simple and usable for managing a database cluster. “PostgreSQL has been around a similar amount of time, but it had different goals back then. They didn’t really have a multi-database story or a master-replica story. MySQL set out with that intention from the early days and had a good replication story in 2001.”

MySQL was created by MySQL AB, a Swedish company founded by two Swedes – David Axmark and Allan Larsson – and a Finn, Michael “Monty” Widenius. Named after Monty’s daughter My, it started by using mSQL, the RDBMS from Hughes Technologies, to connect to tables using its fast low-level (ISAM) routines. After finding the approach lacked speed, the company built a new SQL interface, but kept the same API interface as mSQL. Since June 2000, it has been available under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

From the early days, the MySQL team encouraged input from users and other developers. Russia-born Peter Zaitsev, who went on to co-found open source database consultancy Percona, was involved with MySQL from 1999 as a young entrepreneur and engineer and went to join the company in 2002.

I was one of the early adopters of MySQL 3.23 and there were a lot of bugs. I would spend a lot of time on the mailing list reporting them all and really harassing Monty. Because of that we developed a good relationship.

“I was in Russia, and an entrepreneur looking to build a web statistics application, something similar to Google Analytics. Obviously, I needed a database and a teacher at my university said, ‘Why don’t you take a look at MySQL?’ And he showed me this query he had run on PostgreSQL and MySQL, and on MySQL it was three times faster. And I thought that was so cool,” he said.

Although it had the performance Zaitsev wanted, the fledgling FOSS database was not without its issues. On that point, the attitude of the company behind the system impressed him.

“I was one of the early adopters of MySQL 3.23 and there were a lot of bugs. I would spend a lot of time on the mailing list reporting them all and really harassing Monty. Because of that we developed a good relationship. It was kind of funny. Monty, being Scandinavian, wasn’t like the Americans. You didn’t need to spend half an hour talking about how great somebody is and then ask, ‘Please, please could you fix a damn bug you have in your software.'”

After the flush of the dotcom boom and subsequent crash, Zaitsev found himself needing a job. “I was kind of sneaky. I emailed Monty for a reference, hoping he might offer me a job. And he did,” he said.

At the time, MySQL was a small organization of around 40 people who were mostly engineers. According to Zaitsev, the company was ideological, with management promising it would never be run by salespeople. He ended up leading the high-performance MySQL team before leaving the company in 2006 to start Percona to support implementation of the software in Web 2.0 deployments in the US.

A couple of years later, Sun Microsystems bought MySQL. At the time, Sun was famous for high-performance hardware, its Solaris Unix distribution, and Java, the object-oriented programming language. Java became, in various ways, part of the shift to the web and online services.

Robin Schumacher, Gartner senior research director and database analyst, worked for MySQL when Sun bought it.

“The CEO of Sun at the time (Jonathan Schwartz), when we all gathered for the acquisition meeting, was talking about how he wanted things to operate if they paid a billion dollars for MySQL. At the time, he said, ‘The last thing I want to do is break you guys, or hamper your progress. Whatever else we want, you [are] to continue doing what you’re doing.’ So we were still able to operate as a small startup outfit, within a larger organization. We had the best of both worlds, where you had the quick decision making that you have in startups, coupled with the nice resources of a large enterprise,” Schumacher told The Register.

“Sun, at the time, was not a database player, and so the people who were using MySQL didn’t feel really threatened by Sun in terms of whether they were going to strangle MySQL. When I went on the road and began talking to large government agencies, the leadership came up to me and told me, ‘We trust Sun, and now we trust you.’ And so that actually began to grow our revenue and grow our customers quite well.”

But it was not to last. In 2009, Oracle bought Sun Microsystems for $5.6 billion. Oracle was a database player, having re-engineered the market by popularizing relational database systems from the late 1970s.

The fear among MySQL advocates was understandable. Surely, every time someone deployed the open source database, that would mean dollars taken away from Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison’s fund for the acquisition of Hawaiian islands.

Joking aside, the concern around Oracle’s custodianship of MySQL prompted Widenius to leave the company and launch a campaign to save MySQL and “keep the internet free.”

Knives and forks at dawn

He ended up forking the MySQL code to build MariaDB and a company around the new name. MariaDB experienced a disastrous IPO in late 2022 under the direction of then CEO Michael Howard. After a few ups and considerable downs, the company was bought by private equity outfit K1 Investment Management in September last year, although it is said to enjoy a closer relationship with its open source foundation and continues to be used by flagship customers including Samsung.

However, Oracle’s by-proxy acquisition of MySQL may not have been as bad as some feared.

“Let’s give Oracle its due. If you look at what it has done with MySQL, it continued to enhance it, continued to grow it, continued to offer new and innovative solutions that are either based on it or built on top of it,” Schumacher said. “Many of the same engineering leadership folks that I worked with 20 years ago at MySQL are still there and still working for Oracle. They would not be if Oracle was doing damage, in my eyes, because they’re big believers in open source and all of that.”

Oracle is not without its critics, though. In the last couple of years, Big Red’s focus on Heatwave, an analytics system built on MySQL, has prompted more concerns about the long-term viability of the open source system. The 9.0 release underwhelmed some observers.

Today MySQL is the highest open source database on the DB-Engines ranking, which relies on a mix of mentions on websites, Google search trends, appearance in online technical discussions, job ads, professional profiles, and social media feeds. It is second only to Oracle overall. It is also second on the Stack Overflow survey of professional developers, behind PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL has also become a quasi-front-end to distributed systems including YugabyteDB and CockroachDB, as well as a popular DBaaS provided by AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Nonetheless, MySQL is unlikely to buckle under the challenge. Schumacher pointed out that Gartner sees preference for open source systems increasing. “Given just that spirit and momentum behind open source in general, and MySQL being the leader when someone thinks open source database, I don’t think we’re going to see it fade away anytime soon,” he said.

In fact, YouTube built a distributed system on MySQL and the resulting Vitess is used by the likes of Slack, Airbnb, and GitHub. PlanetScale, which provides a database service for Vitess, aims to power a new generation of web-based startups.

Regardless of PostgreSQL’s challenge, MySQL’s legacy is assured for its role in the LAMP stack, which saw the explosion of social media and consumer sites take over the world from the early Noughties. Schumacher recalls one startup CEO saying at the time that he wouldn’t have a business without MySQL.

“As well as cost, it was the ease of use. The fact that you didn’t have cumbersome licensing to deal with meant developers could simply download the software and get started that same hour with it, versus having to go through procurement and deal with Oracle or Microsoft. We’re so used to seeing these things today. You have to remember that back then, they didn’t exist,” he said.

Whether the always-online world of business, politics, and culture MySQL helped to create is worth celebrating is a matter for others to debate. However you view it, there’s no going back. ®

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