Why MySQL?
Note: This article’s author is Heather VanCura
MySQL is the world’s most popular open-source relational database used by millions of developers. MySQL is consistently ranked as one of the most popular databases for developers.
Not including Oracle employees, over 100 people have made over 600 contributions to the MySQL Source code. This includes individuals as well as companies using and deploying MySQL in their enterprises. MySQL can be used with the most popular programming languages and offers support for Java, PHP, Python, Node.js, Ruby, Go, Rust, C/C++/C#. MySQL powers many of the most accessed applications, including Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Shopify, and Booking.com. MySQL is also the database of choice for many open-source applications, like WordPress,
Drupal, Joomla, and Magneto.
Why use MySQL: the Benefits of MySQL
- Ease of use — installation can take just a few minutes.
- Reliability — For over 25 years, many of the world’s largest companies have used MySQL in various scenarios and business-critical applications.
- Scalability — MySQL’s native replication architecture allows organizations to scale applications to support billions of users.
- High availability — MySQL offers a complete set of native, fully integrated replication technology for high availability and disaster recovery.
- Flexibility — MySQL Document Store gives developers flexibility in developing SQL-based and NoSQL-based database applications.
Where can you learn about MySQL?
MySQL Shorts are short instructional videos geared toward highlighting MySQL features and functionality. New episodes are released on an ongoing basis.
You can check out these videos in the MySQL Shorts playlist on the MySQL YouTube Channel. Here are the top three most popular videos in this playlist to get you started.
Episode 2: Connecting to a MySQL Database Using MySQL Shell
This video shows how you can use MySQL Shell to connect to a MySQL database using the x-protocol.
Episode 3: Importing JSON to a MySQL table with JSON column.
This video shows how to import JSON data into a MySQL Table and put the JSON into a column that uses the JSON data type.
Episode 25: Creating a Stored Function in MySQL
MySQL allows developers to create their own functions that work in much the same way as built-in functions. In this video we discuss the syntax for creating a stored function, defining the function arguments, specifying the return type, declaring and setting variables, and returning values.
The Oracle MySQL blog is also a great resource to learn more about MySQL.
MySQL is also Popular in the Cloud
MySQL can also be run on cloud computing platforms such as Oracle Cloud Intrastructure (OCI), Microsuft Azure and Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute. In addition, MySQL Heatwave is a cloud offering that provides in-database Machine Learning (ML) capabilities.
MySQL HeatWave is a fully managed database service, powered by the integrated HeatWave in-memory query accelerator. It’s the only cloud database service that combines transactions, real-time analytics across data warehouses and data lakes, and machine learning (ML) services into one MySQL Database — without the complexity, latency, cost, and risk of ETL duplication. MySQL HeatWave is 6.5X faster than Amazon Redshift at half the cost, 7X faster than Snowflake at one-fifth the cost, and 1,400X faster than Amazon Aurora at half the cost.
With MySQL HeatWave AutoML, developers and data analysts can build, train, deploy, and explain machine learning models within MySQL HeatWave in a fully automated way — 25X faster than Amazon Redshift ML at 1% of the cost.
