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MySQL is a powerful and the most popular Open Source Software relational database management system (RDBMS) that uses SQL (Structured Query Language). MySQL is officially pronounced "My esquel", not "My sequel". It is popular for web applications. Previously, MySQL was developed, distributed, and supported by MySQL AB now acquired by Sun Microsystems.

MySQL Development History

- MySQL was first released internally on 23 May 1995
- Windows version was released on January 8, 1998 for Windows 95 and NT
- Version 3.23: beta from June 2000, production release January 2001
- Version 4.0: beta from August 2002, production release March 2003
- Version 4.1: beta from June 2004, production release October 2004
- Version 5.0: beta from March 2005, production release October 2005
- Version 5.1: currently pre-production (since November 2005)
- Sun Microsystems acquires MySQL AB on 26 February 2008

MySQL Features History

- Version 3.23.23 Full-Text Search 
- Version 4.0 Full-Text Search (IN BOOLEAN MODE), UNIONS
- Version 4.1 R-Tree and B-Tree, Sub-Queries, Prepared Statements
- Version 5.0 Cursors, Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views, XA Transactions
- Version 5.1 Event Scheduler, Partitioning, Plugin API, Row-Based Replication, Server Log Tables

To access MySQL databases several Libraries are available in all major programming languages. Beside this, an ODBC interface named MyODBC allows additional programming languages that support the ODBC interface to communicate with a MySQL database, such as Coldfusion or ASP. The MySQL server and its official libraries are mostly implemented in ANSI C/ANSI C++. The MySQL Web site http://www.mysql.com provides the latest information about MySQL.