OPEN FOR
BUSINESS
MySQL community wins
with better innovation, support,
and integration. BY DAVID A. KELLY
SOMETIMES, RELATIVELY SMALL THINGS CAN MAKE A BIG IMPACT. TAKE THE CASE
of the MySQL database. First released in 1995 and purchased by Sun in 2008, MySQL has quickly
graduated from the realm of hobbyists to the world of business, becoming the leading open source
database for many Web applications and an integral part of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
Web application stack. Almost a year after Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, MySQL plays an even bigger
role in enterprises of all sizes worldwide.
“I think that MySQL, and all the experimenting that people are doing with it, helps to advance
database technology in general,” says Carl Olofson, research vice president of database manage-
ment and data integration software research at International Data Corporation (IDC). “It’s a type
of ‘rising tide that lifts all boats’ phenomenon in which even people in the commercial database
world can benefit from products like MySQL that get adopted, adjusted, and extended to work
effectively in different problem spaces.”
Olofson goes on to explain that MySQL has become a popular solution across a variety of applica-
tions and services with varying business requirements. “A lot of people using MySQL to create Web
applications and online services choose to use MySQL because it enables them to scale up their
environment in a fairly low-cost way,” says Olofson. “We’re also seeing a lot of companies using
