MySQL 1.0 Released — The Open RDB That Powered the LAMP Stack

On 23 May 1995, the Swedish developer Michael "Monty" Widenius released the first version of a small RDBMS he had been building at home. It would come to be called MySQL, and it would underpin the internet boom of the 2000s to the point of becoming synonymous with "the standard RDB for web development".

Origins — An In-House Tool at TcX

MySQL's prehistory runs back to 1979. Widenius, then 17, joined the Swedish firm TcX DataKonsult AB (later TcX) and wrote UNIREG, an ISAM-based database library for warehouse management. In the early 1990s TcX needed to give UNIREG a SQL interface.

The team considered the existing mSQL (1994, Hughes Technologies), but neither its performance nor its feature set met the requirement. Widenius therefore built an mSQL-compatible SQL layer on top of UNIREG's fast storage engine—and that is MySQL.

The name "MySQL" comes from Widenius's elder daughter, My (his younger daughter is Maria—the source of MariaDB's name).

23 May 1995 — First Release

On 23 May 1995, Widenius effectively founded MySQL AB with David Axmark and Allan Larsson and released the first internal version of MySQL. In October 1996, MySQL 3.11.1 was made public, with free binaries for Linux and Solaris reaching developers worldwide.

The licence was a distinctive dual licence: GPL (open source) plus a commercial licence. Individual users and web developers paid nothing; embedded-product vendors and companies that wanted to avoid GPL distribution paid for the commercial licence. That two-tier model became one of the templates for later OSS businesses.

The LAMP Stack — The Substrate of Web 2.0

MySQL went viral because it sat at the heart of the LAMP stack: Linux (OS), Apache (web server), MySQL (DB), PHP/Perl/Python (language). All free, all available together—LAMP became the default configuration for websites, blogs, and SaaS apps through the 2000s.

WordPress (2003) defaulted to MySQL; phpBB and MediaWiki (the engine behind Wikipedia) ran on MySQL; Facebook's early stack used MySQL; YouTube, Twitter, and Booking.com all rested on it. Most major web services of the time stood on MySQL. The web developer's demand—"don't worry about strict ACID, give me a fast and easy RDB"—mapped exactly to what MySQL offered.

The secret of that speed was the default MyISAM storage engine: no transactions, no row-level locks, weak crash safety. In exchange, on read-heavy workloads, it delivered throughput that beat Oracle and PostgreSQL. The InnoDB engine later added ACID compliance, and version 5.5 (2010) promoted InnoDB to default.

Sun Acquisition, then Oracle

In January 2008, Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB for US$1 billion—the largest acquisition of an open-source company at the time. "MySQL is to Sun what Java is to Sun," said CEO Jonathan Schwartz; Sun envisioned a vertically integrated server-storage-OS-language-DB stack.

But in 2010, Oracle acquired Sun for US$7.4 billion. MySQL passed into the realm of Larry Ellison's Oracle Database. The shock to the open-source community is hardly worth describing: the world's biggest commercial RDB vendor now owned the world's most popular open-source RDB.

The MariaDB Fork — An Open Successor

In 2009, anticipating the Oracle deal, Widenius himself forked MySQL as MariaDB, named after his younger daughter. The reasoning: "If Oracle squeezes MySQL development, the world needs an open alternative."

In 2012, Wikipedia and Google announced migrations to MariaDB. Many Linux distributions—Debian, Red Hat family, Arch—switched their default from MySQL to MariaDB. Oracle's MySQL continued to evolve: MySQL 8.0 (2018) strengthened document support (JSON and a MongoDB-compatible API), and 8.4 LTS shipped in 2024. The two lines have continued in parallel ever since.

What 23 May 1995 Means

To the lineage of commercial RDBs—Codd's relational model, then Oracle V2, then IBM DB2—MySQL added a fourth pole: "free, fast, and built for the web". It traded standard SQL polish to put a "good enough RDB" into the hands of every developer on the planet, and that choice shaped the form of the internet from the 2000s onward. If Facebook had had to pay Oracle's licence in its early years, Web 2.0 would look very different.