MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS)[1] which has more than 11 million installations. The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.

MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase. The project's source code is available under terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements.

"MySQL" is officially pronounced (My S Q L), not "My sequel" .

MySQL is popular for web applications and acts as the database component of the LAMP, BAMP, MAMP, and WAMP platforms (Linux/BSD/Mac/Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python), and for open-source bug tracking tools like Bugzilla. Its popularity for use with web applications is closely tied to the popularity of PHP and Ruby on Rails, which are often combined with MySQL. PHP and MySQL are essential components for running popular content management systems such as Drupal, e107, Joomla!, WordPress and some BitTorrent trackers. Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki software, which is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database.


MySQL is written in C and C++. The SQL parser uses yacc and a home-brewed lexer.

MySQL works on many different system platforms, including AIX, BSDi, FreeBSD, HP-UX, i5/OS, Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Novell NetWare, OpenBSD, eComStation , OS/2 Warp, QNX, IRIX, Solaris, Symbian, SunOS, SCO OpenServer, SCO UnixWare, Sanos, Tru64, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. A port of MySQL to OpenVMS is also available.

Libraries for accessing MySQL databases are available in all major programming languages with language-specific APIs. In addition, an ODBC interface called MyODBC allows additional programming languages that support the ODBC interface to communicate with a MySQL database, such as ASP or ColdFusion. The MySQL server and official libraries are mostly implemented in ANSI C/ANSI C++.

To administer MySQL databases one can use the included command-line tool (commands: mysql and mysqladmin). Also downloadable from the MySQL site are GUI administration tools: MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser. Both of the GUI tools are now included in one package called tools/5.0.html MySQL GUI Tools.

In addition to the above-mentioned tools developed by MySQL AB, there are several other commercial and non-commercial tools available. Examples include phpMyAdmin, a free Web-based administration interface implemented in PHP, Navicat Lite Edition, a free desktop based GUI tool.