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MySQL is a Relational Database Management System. This is perhaps a bit of an overly technical and cryptic answer to the question, so let’s take a look at this piece by piece.

What is a Database?

Simply put, a database is a system that allows you to store, organize and retrieve a large amount of data quickly and easily. Odds are, if a website does anything more complicated than simply providing basic information about a single company or person, a database was involved in the building. Whether it’s storing user account information, blog posts, news articles or images, if you want to manage a large amount of data, you need a database. Databases make it possible to quickly access the data you need, even if it’s one of thousands or millions of similar pieces of information.

What Does MySQL Bring to the Table?

As a relational database management system, MySQL offers the ability to abstract what the end user sees and interacts with from the physical realities of storing the data. Practically speaking, this allows great freedom to design applications and web pages without having to worry about how all your data is stored. With MySQL you can manage multiple databases and control who gets access to this data. Also worth mentioning is how the seamless integration between MySQL and the popular scripting language PHP has made the two names almost synonymous in the open source development world. As the most heavily developed open source database management system on the market, MySQL has all the critical features necessary to the operation of a database as well as additional functionality such as multiple native storage engines and commit grouping.

What Do You Mean By Open Source?

Open source software is software of which source code is openly published and can be used, modified or distributed free of royalties. The most obvious benefit here is that MySQL gives you access to a top quality database without having to pay the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in licensing fees that are charged for SQL Server or Oracle. This is a strong motivating factor behind many small businesses choosing MySQL as their database management system of choice. Additionally, open source means that the MySQL project is under constant development by a large community of interested programmers. In open source projects, development decisions and the source code itself are subject to rigorous peer review and scrutiny. This means that MySQL is regularly updated, its development roadmap is freely available and its source code is transparent.

In many ways MySQL is the perfect solution for small to medium-sized businesses that are looking to launch web pages and applications. MySQL is feature rich, well supported and, lest we forget, free. But please don’t get the idea that MySQL is strictly small potatoes. Many well-known projects such as Facebook, Flickr and even Google make use of MySQL. MySQL isn’t just great for when you first start out; it has the tools and capability to scale from a small website to a massive behemoth like Facebook. So, when you’re searching for a web hosting provider, it is important to make sure that they provide support for MySQL databases.

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