MySQL's First Release — The Open RDB That Powered the LAMP Stack

On 23 May 1995, the first version of a small RDBMS built by the Swedish developer Michael "Monty" Widenius went out. 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

TcX had been working with database programs since 1979. Widenius (b. 1962), alongside Allan Larsson, was part of the Swedish firm TcX DataKonsult AB, and wrote UNIREG, an ISAM-based database tool for warehouse management. In the early 1990s TcX needed to give UNIREG a SQL interface.

The team looked at the existing mSQL, David Hughes's lightweight SQL engine. The MySQL reference manual records the verdict: "after some testing, we came to the conclusion that mSQL was not fast enough or flexible enough for our needs." Widenius therefore wrote a new SQL engine over UNIREG's fast storage layer while keeping "almost the same API interface as mSQL", so that third-party code written for mSQL could be ported across easily.

The name "MySQL", the reference manual says, comes from co-founder Monty Widenius's daughter My. His other daughter, Maria, later gave MariaDB its name; his son Max is behind MaxDB.

23 May 1995 — First Release

On 23 May 1995, MySQL AB—Widenius with David Axmark and Allan Larsson—put out the first version of MySQL. It was internal. What reached the world was MySQL 3.11.1 in October 1996: a binary distribution for Solaris first, Linux 2.0 binaries in November, sources the month after. Accounts of the version numbering in this stretch disagree; a contemporary write-up puts version 1.0 in May 1996, released "to a limited group of four people".

The licence was not the GPL. As Widenius later described it, bootstrapping MySQL AB meant "a license that allowed free usage, but a 'pay-for' license if you used MYSQL for commercial usage or on the Windows platform"—the UNIX terms were modelled on Aladdin Ghostscript's. The move to the GPL came in 2000, with the 3.23 line, and by Widenius's own account it was "mostly to avoid having to explain our own license to everyone." From then the dual licence—buy the commercial licence and the GPL's redistribution obligation is waived—became MySQL AB's revenue engine and 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. Sun's own 2008 press release listed Facebook, Google, Nokia, Baidu, and China Mobile among MySQL's deployments. 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, table-level rather than row-level locking, weak crash safety. Giving those up bought lightness and speed on read-heavy workloads. The InnoDB engine later brought transactions and ACID, and MySQL 5.5 (December 2010) promoted InnoDB to default.

Sun Acquisition, then Oracle

On 16 January 2008 Sun Microsystems announced a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB "for approximately $1 billion in total consideration"; the deal closed on 26 February. It was among the largest acquisitions of an open-source company to that date. In the press release, CEO Jonathan Schwartz said:

"Today's acquisition reaffirms Sun's position at the center of the global Web economy. ... MySQL's employees and culture, along with its near ubiquity across the Web, make it an ideal fit with Sun's open approach to network innovation."

The same release called MySQL "the 'M' in LAMP" and set out Sun's plan to bind server, storage, OS, language, and database together.

The next year Oracle announced its purchase of Sun (April 2009, US$7.4 billion), completing it on 27 January 2010. MySQL passed to the company that also owned Oracle Database. The shock to the open-source community is hardly worth describing: the world's biggest commercial RDB vendor now owned the most widely deployed open-source RDB.

The MariaDB Fork — An Open Successor

Before Oracle's move on Sun was even announced, Widenius declared on 5 February 2009 that he was leaving Sun. His stated reason was not Oracle but the development process under Sun: he was "not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed" and wanted "the server development to be moved to a true open development environment that would encourage outside participation." At that point he framed his branch as explicitly not a fork—but what grew out of it was MariaDB, named after his other daughter, Maria. The first release from his new company Monty Program Ab, MariaDB 5.1.38, came on 29 October 2009.

In April 2013 the Wikimedia Foundation migrated the English and German Wikipedias and Wikidata to MariaDB 5.5. That September a Google engineer described at the XLDB conference the migration of Google's internal MySQL fleet to MariaDB 10.0. Linux distributions followed: openSUSE 12.3 and Fedora 19 (both 2013), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (2014), Debian 9 (2017). Oracle's MySQL kept developing too—a native JSON type in 5.7 (2015), then the Document Store over X DevAPI, which lets document-style access live in the same server as SQL (it is MySQL's own API, not a MongoDB-compatible one). 8.0 shipped in April 2018 and 8.4 LTS in April 2024. The two lines have continued in parallel ever since.

A Fourth Pole After Oracle and DB2

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.