The rise of MySQL in the web era
MySQL’s origin story is rooted in the early open source movement. In 1995, Swedish developer Michael “Monty” Widenius created MySQL as an internal project, releasing it to the public soon after. By 2000, MySQL was fully open sourced (GPL license), and its popularity exploded. As the database component of the LAMP stack, MySQL offered an irresistible combination for web developers: It was free, easy to install, and “good enough” to back dynamic websites. In an era dominated by expensive proprietary databases, MySQL’s arrival was perfectly timed. Web startups of the 2000s—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and countless others—embraced MySQL to store user data and content. MySQL quickly became synonymous with building websites.
Early MySQL gained traction despite some trade-offs. In its youth, MySQL lacked certain “enterprise” features (like full SQL compliance or transactions in its default engine), but this simplicity was a feature, not a bug, for many users. It made MySQL blazingly fast for reads and simple queries and easier to manage for newcomers. Developers could get a MySQL database running with minimal fuss—a contrast to heavier systems like Oracle or even PostgreSQL at the time. “It’s hard to compete with easy,” I observed in 2022.
By the mid-2000s, MySQL was everywhere and was increasingly feature-rich. The database had matured (adding InnoDB, a more robust storage engine for transactions) and continued to ride the web explosion. Even as newer databases emerged, MySQL remained a default choice for millions of deployments, from small business applications to large-scale web infrastructure. As of 2025, MySQL is likely still the widest-deployed open source (or proprietary) database globally by sheer volume of installations. Scads of applications were written with MySQL as the backing store, and many remain in active use. In this sense, MySQL today is a bit like IBM’s DB2: a workhorse database with a massive installed base that isn’t disappearing, even if it’s no longer the trendiest choice.