MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.

The MySQL development project has made its source code available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements. MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now owned by Sun Microsystems, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation.

Members of the MySQL community have created several forks such as Drizzle and MariaDB. Both forks were in progress before the Oracle acquisition (Drizzle was announced 8 months before the Sun acquisition).Free-software projects that require a full-featured database management system often use MySQL. Such projects include (for example) WordPress, phpBB, Drupal and other software built on the LAMP software stack. MySQL is also used in many high-profile, large-scale World Wide Web products including Wikipedia, Google and Facebook.

Uses:

The "M" in the acronym of the popular LAMP software stack refers to MySQL. Its popularity for use with web applications is closely tied to the popularity of PHP (the "P" in LAMP). Several high-traffic web sites (including Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Google (though not for searches), Nokia and YouTube) use MySQL for data storage and logging of user data.

Platforms & Interfaces:

MySQL works on many different system platforms, including AIX, BSDi, FreeBSD, HP-UX, i5/OS, Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Novell NetWare, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, eComStation, OS/2 Warp, QNX, IRIX, Solaris, Symbian, SunOS, SCO OpenServer, SCO UnixWare, Sanos, Tru64 and Microsoft Windows. A port of MySQL to OpenVMS also exists.

All major programming languages with language-specific APIs include Libraries for accessing MySQL databases. 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 HTSQL - URL based query method also ships with MySQL adapter allowing direct interaction with MySQL database from any web client via structured URLs. The MySQL server and official libraries are mostly implemented in ANSI C/ANSI C++.

Demonstration (Our projects):

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