MySQL
- Date
- 1995 · confidence high
- Place
- Uppsala, Sweden
- Credited to
- Michael 'Monty' Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson (MySQL AB)
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
A free relational database management system, released in May 1995 by the Swedish-Finnish company MySQL AB. Fast, simple and free, it became the database of first-generation web (LAMP).
Widenius had created its predecessor, UNIREG, in 1979 at TcX (Sweden). Sun bought MySQL AB in 2008 for about $1 billion and Oracle bought Sun in 2010.
What it led to
- the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) for websites
- the databases of Wikipedia, Facebook and WordPress in their early years
- the MariaDB fork (2009) after the purchase by Sun and Oracle