MySQL Database Overview

MySQL is a open source database which means it's freely available with free redistribution, this means you have full access to the source code. MySQL began as Unireg that was developed by Michael "Monty" Widenius for a swedish company called TcX during the 1980's, the My part is Monty's daughters name. The initial release in 1995 had a SQL interface and a dual license model, a free and an embedded version. David Axmark, Monty and Allen Larrson founded MySQL AB in 1995, it was taken over by Sun Microsystems in 2008 and Sun itself was taken by Oracle in 2010.

MySQL is written in C and C++ and in 2001 MySQL began supporting transactions with the integration of the BDB and InnoDB engines (the default engine), this allowed for safer handling of concurrent write operations, which began the trend of adding features needed by the Enterprise environments.

MySQL supports the following platforms and has both 32-bit and 64-bit versions available
- Linux
- Solaris
- Windows
- AIX
- HPUX

Although MySQL comes with no tools, there are a number of graphical tools available the main one being the MySQL workbench.

MySQL comes in following editions, commercial customers have a number of different choices depending on your needs.
- Community Server (free edition)
- Standard Edition
- Enterprise Edition
- Cluster Carrier Grade edition

All in the following flavours have the following features

- Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture
- Multiple Storage Engines InnoDB, MyISAM, NDB (MySQL Cluster), Memory, Merge, Archive, CSV, etc
- Replication
- Partitioning
- Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views
- Information Schema
- MySQL connectors (ODBC, JDBC, .NET, etc)
- MySQL Workbench for visual modeling, SQL development and administration.

Lastly before I start on the architecture there are a number of user community projects or resources that you may be interested in
- MySQL Blog - good place to start to see other users experience with MySQL
- MySQL Podcasts - good place to get some learning tips and presentations can even download to your phone for viewing on the train, etc
- MySQL Newsletter - get the latest information on MySQL what's coming and any security notices, etc