The History of MySQL | My Free World - PHP

Depending on how much detail you want, the history of MySQL can be traced as far back as 1979, when MySQL’s creator, Monty Widenius, worked for a Swedish IT and data consulting firm, TcX. While at TcX, Monty authored UNIREG, a terminal interface builder that connected to raw ISAM data stores. In the intervening 15 years, UNIREG served its makers rather well through a series of translations and extensions to accommodate increasingly large data sets.

In 1994, when TcX began working on Web data applications, chinks in the UNIREG armor, primarily having to do with application overhead, began to appear. This sent Monty and his colleagues off to look for other tools. One they inspected rather closely was Hughes mSQL, a light and zippy database application developed by David Hughes. mSQL possessed the distinct advantages of being inexpensive and somewhat entrenched in the market, as well as featuring a fairly well-developed client API. The 1.0 series of mSQL release lacked indexing, however, a feature crucial to performance with large data stores. Although the 2.0 series of mSQL would see the addition of this feature, the particular implementation used was not compatible with UNIREG’s B+-based features. At this point, MySQL, at least conceptually, was born.

Monty and TcX decided to start with the substantial work already done on UNIREG while developing a new API that was substantially similar to that used by mSQL, with the exception of the more effective UNIREG indexing scheme. By early 1995, TcX had a 1.0 version of this new product ready. They gave it the moniker MySQL and later that year released it under a combination open source and commercial licensing scheme that allowed continued development of the product while providing a revenue stream for MySQL AB, the company that evolved from TcX.

Over the past ten years, MySQL has truly developed into a world class product. MySQL now competes with even the most feature-rich commercial database applications such as Oracle and Informix. Additions in the 4.x series have included much-requested features such as transactions and foreign key support. All this has made MySQL the world’s most used open source database.