Spero Consulting

Who Uses MySQL?

You do every day and every time you visit this site or mil­lions of oth­ers on the web.

Not that it mat­ters and not that we fol­low such mat­ters very closely, but until today we have never agreed with any of the Euro­pean Union’s anti-​trust actions against U.S. firms. How­ever, today The Wall Street Jour­nal reports Deal to Buy Sun Meets Oppo­si­tion From EU.

While U.S. anti-​trust author­i­ties approved the merger, the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion is con­cerned about the anti-​competitive effect of Oracle’s pro­posed takeover of Sun Microsys­tems because Sun owns MySQL data­base soft­ware, which is very pop­u­lar open-​source soft­ware and pow­ers many, many dynamic web sites. (We say my-​sequel while other pro­nounce it my-​es-​que-​ell. Whatever.)

Unlike html-​based sites, dynamic sites write pages “on-​the-​fly” by query­ing MySQL data­bases. (Actu­ally, there are hybrid sites, too, that cre­ate, cached, html ver­sions of the data­base calls and queries.) In fact, for many dynamic sites, the search engines don’t actu­ally visit pages, and some­times don’t query the MySQL data­base; instead robots are directed a copy of an XML ver­sion of the site’s content.

If you see the asp exten­sion on an inter­ac­tive form or page, then you know it is a MS-​based active server page. While there are a few other appli­ca­tions, if you see no exten­sion or a php exten­sion, then there is a very high prob­a­bil­ity that the page or form was gen­er­ated from data stored in MySQL, and if it is an inter­ac­tive form, then when you click “sub­mit” the form entries are being sent to a MySQL database.

Any­way, when the acqui­si­tion was announced we won­dered how it would affect the future avail­abil­ity of MySQL. Ora­cle claims that it is not an issue, but we also won­der about future improve­ment and devel­op­ment, too. Ora­cle and the U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment have con­cluded that other open source soft­ware will take its place.

We’re not as sure because the open-​source and free nature of MySQL makes it the data­base on the web. It’s fast, it’s free, it’s large-​scale, and industrial-​strength. What’s not to like? (HTML based sites are sooo sec­ond mil­len­nium, and Flash-​based sites are like stereo-​typical blond beau­ties: pretty, but dumb, par­tic­u­larly with respect to search-​engine-​optimization.)

MySQL is the “M” in LAMP (Linux-​Apache-​MySQL-​PHP) servers/​web plat­forms. All four com­po­nents are open-​source and free and state-​of-​the-​art and per­mit web host­ing ser­vices to offer shared host­ing sites for only a few dol­lars per month. (LAMP and WAMP and XAMMP and var­i­ous other bun­dles can all be down­loaded for free and installed on home or com­pany servers, and all work flawlessly.)

We don’t have much expe­ri­ence with expen­sive, large-​scale data­bases like Ora­cle, but in our view, these var­i­ous AMP pack­ages are far supe­rior to their equiv­a­lent Microsoft prod­ucts (and, of course, far cheaper).

All of our web design and infor­ma­tion sys­tem design work uses MySQL com­bined with either free or very inex­pen­sive web appli­ca­tions and form gen­er­a­tors. The form gen­er­a­tors are very sophis­ti­cated and per­mit writ­ing and query­ing of the MySQL data­bases. It’s very easy for small and mid-​sized firms to leap-​frog large, bureau­cratic orga­ni­za­tions to obtain afford­able, cus­tomized, and state-​of-​the-​art web-​based sys­tems for both inter­nal and exter­nal users.

It’s a great time to be alive and to con­sult on these issues. Along with other open-​source soft­ware and appli­ca­tions, MySQL is a large part of the beauty of it all.