The History of MySQL: From a Swedish Startup to Oracle and MariaDB
MySQL was created in Sweden and released in 1995, then bought by Sun and Oracle and forked as MariaDB. Here is how the web's favourite database evolved.
If your website has a database, it is quite likely to be MySQL or MariaDB. The story of how these two relate to each other is a good illustration of how open-source software, commerce and community interact, and it involves one of the large corporate deals of the 2000s.
Relational databases in brief
A relational database stores data in tables of rows and columns, and uses a language called SQL (Structured Query Language) to read and change it. The theory comes from the English computer scientist Edgar F. Codd, who described the relational model at IBM in 1970. Commercial systems such as Oracle and IBM's DB2 made it a business standard in the 1980s. These were powerful but expensive, and aimed at large organisations.
A fast database for the web
MySQL was created in Sweden by Michael "Monty" Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson, who founded the company MySQL AB in 1995. Widenius had developed an internal tool based on an existing low-level storage approach and wanted to connect it to SQL. The first release in 1995 was designed for speed and simplicity. It was very fast for reading data, which is what most websites do.
The name is a combination of "SQL" and "My", the name of Widenius's daughter. The same practice of naming after children would later reappear.
MySQL's early versions left out features that serious database users expected, such as transactions and foreign keys. Many developers accepted this because speed and ease of installation were more important to web projects. Later versions added a storage engine called InnoDB, which supports transactions and became the default.
Why MySQL fit the web so well
- It ran on Linux and other free systems, and was free for most uses under the GNU General Public License.
- It worked closely with PHP, which included a MySQL extension early on.
- It was easy to install and administer, and tools like phpMyAdmin gave a web interface to it.
Those qualities made it the "M" of the LAMP stack. Open-source applications such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla were written for it.
Sun, Oracle and the fork
MySQL AB was acquired by Sun Microsystems, which announced the deal in January 2008 at a price of about one billion US dollars. In 2009 Oracle, which had a competing commercial database business, announced it would acquire Sun, and the deal was completed in early 2010 after review by regulators in the United States and Europe.
Many in the open-source community were concerned about what Oracle would do with a free competitor to its flagship product. Widenius, who had left Sun, started a fork of the MySQL code base, which he named MariaDB after his younger daughter, Maria. The MariaDB project is run by a foundation and aims to remain open and compatible with MySQL.
MySQL and MariaDB today
Many Linux distributions and hosting platforms moved their default from MySQL to MariaDB in the years after the fork. The two products started as near-identical and have diverged over time, with different features and version numbers. For typical website use, such as WordPress, either one works, and applications usually specify which versions they support.
| Point | MySQL | MariaDB |
|---|---|---|
| Started | 1995 | 2009 (fork) |
| Owner | Oracle | MariaDB Foundation and company |
| Typical use on hosting | Common | Common |
| Compatibility | Original | Largely compatible with MySQL for common uses |
What a site owner should do with a database
- Back it up. Your posts, orders and users are in the database, not in your files.
- Use a unique user and strong password for each application's database.
- Keep the database private. Most sites do not need the database reachable from the internet.
- Clean up. Old revisions and expired temporary data can make a database larger and slower than necessary.
Why the database often becomes the bottleneck
As a website grows, the database is usually the first component to feel the strain. Every page view in a content management system may trigger several queries, and a slow query can hold up the whole page. The usual remedies are a mixture of caching, so that the database is asked less often, indexes, so that the queries it does receive are cheap, and more memory, so that frequently used data stays in RAM. Understanding this helps you decide when to move up from shared hosting: if your site is slow because of database load rather than file size, a plan with dedicated resources will help more than a bigger disk.
The same ideas explain why database performance tuning became a specialist skill in the 2000s. MySQL's configuration offers many settings, and the right values depend on the amount of memory, the type of workload and the storage engine in use. Managed platforms apply sensible defaults so that most site owners never need to touch them.
The lesson for site owners
The MySQL story shows why open standards matter. Because SQL and the MySQL protocol are widely supported, you can move a database between servers, or between MySQL and MariaDB, without rewriting your application. That portability is what makes changing hosts possible. When you move to Zebra Hosting, the team transfers your databases as part of the free migration, and Plesk provides tools for managing and backing them up. For workloads that need more memory for the database, a VPS lets you tune the settings yourself.
