In more than 11 million servers which are host to nearly a billion websites, one database manager is used over any other. The MySQL is a database server and management system that allows for multiple simultaneous users on a website that serves dynamic content pulled from the database. A Swedish company owns the rights to MySQL, and although they are a for-profit corporation, the source code for the database is open sourced under the GNU license.
The MySQL database can be used on the LAMP, MAMP, BAMP as well as WAMP operating platforms which makes it perfect for just about any website irregardless of whether it is on a Windows server or a Linux one. Furthermore, it can be used with a wide variety of web development languages such as PHP, Python as well as Perl. It is mostly popularly used with web applications such as Drupal, Joomla and a lot more.
MySQL is capable of handling a wide range of websites as well. While there are some database servers that can only handle smaller websites, to date MySQL has been the database of choice in websites like Wikipedia, MediaWiki, Google, Facebook, Flickr and even YouTube. As one will notice right away, each one of the listed sites that use MySQL average several million unique daily visitors to their site and in the case of YouTube, thousands of terabytes of data is retrieved every day from a MySQL database.
Written using both C as well as C++, the MySQL database management system has proven to be very robust. There are two versions of the program of which one is Community while the other is Enterprise with the latter being updated more regularly as well as coming with a vast support network too.
Administrating the database has also been simplified by means of both a GUI for desktop administration as well as a browser based system. The GUI tools can be freely downloaded from their website and are known as MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser. The web based administration also is freely downloaded, except for this one you have to seek out the PHP website. In most cases, phpMyAdmin is the most commonly used tool.
All in all, while there may be some bugs; some of which have been known for many years already, most of these will never be seen. In some cases though these bugs can be troublesome especially in cases in which you are trying to use multiple server cores to access the same data from the server. While there were many bug that were fixed with the release of version 5.0, many still remain today and developers are hoping that the next version, MySQL 6, will solve most if not all of them.
Original Authors: Nick
Edit Update Authors: None
Updated On: 04/02/2009
