What Is MySQL

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∟What Is MySQL

Quick introduction of MySQL with a list of main features.

What Is MySQL? MySQL is an open source Relational DataBase Management System (RDBMS) developed by MySQL AB, see mysql.com Website. MySQL was started with mSQL with fast low-level (ISAM) routines.

As of 2019, MySQL is the second most widely used RDBMS in the world.

Main features of MySQL (extracted from MySQL manual):

Works on many different platforms.
APIs for C, C++, Eiffel, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl are available.
Fully multi-threaded using kernel threads.
Provides transactional and non-transactional storage engines.
Uses very fast B-tree disk tables (MyISAM) with index compression.
Very fast joins using an optimized one-sweep multi-join.
SQL functions are implemented using a highly optimized class library and should be as fast as possible.
Support for aliases on tables and columns as required by SQL-92.
Handles large databases. We use MySQL Server with databases that contain 50 million records. We also know of users that use MySQL Server with 60,000 tables and about 5,000,000,000 rows.
Clients may connect to the MySQL server using TCP/IP sockets on any platform.
The Connector/ODBC interface provides MySQL support for client programs that use ODBC (Open-DataBase-Connectivity) connections.
The Connector/JDBC interface provides MySQL support for Java client programs that use JDBC connections.

Releases of MySQL:

MySQL 8.0 - 2018
MySQL 5.7 - 2015
MySQL 5.6 - 2013
MySQL 5.5 - 2010
MySQL 5.1 - 2008
MySQL 5.0 - 2005
MySQL 4.1 - 2004
MySQL 4.0 - 2002
MySQL 3.2 - 1997
MySQL 1.0 - 1995