The MySQL development process focuses on offering a very efficient implementation of the features most people need. This means that MySQL still has fewer features than its chief open source competitor, PostgreSQL, or the commercial database engines. Nevertheless, the skills you get from this book will serve you well on any platform.
Many database management systems—even open source ones—preceded MySQL. Why has MySQL been the choice for so many beginners and small sites, and now for some heavyweight database users in government and industry? We can suggest a few factors:
- Size and speed
MySQL can run on very modest hardware and puts very little strain on system resources; many small users serve up information to their organizations by running MySQL on modest desktop systems. The speed with which it can retrieve information has made it a longstanding favorite of web administrators.
Over the past few years, MySQL AB has addressed the need of larger sites by adding features that necessarily slow down retrieval, but its modular design lets you ignore the advanced features and maintain the suppleness and speed for which MySQL is famous.
- Ease of installation
Partly because MySQL is small and fast, it works the way most people want straight “out of the box.” It can be installed without a lot of difficult and sophisticated configuration. Now that many Linux distributions include MySQL, installation can be almost automatic.
This doesn’t mean MySQL is free of administrative tasks. In particular, we’ll cover a few things you need to do at the start to tighten security. Very little configuration is shown in this book, however, which is a tribute to the database engine’s convenience and natural qualities.
- Attention to standards
As we’ll explain in the Structured Query Language” section later in this chapter, multiple standards exist in the relational database world, and it’s impossible to claim total conformance. But learning MySQL certainly prepares you for moving to other database engines. Moving code from one database engine to another is never trivial, but MySQL does a reasonable job of providing a standard environment, and gets better as it develops more features.
- Responsiveness to community
With a few hundred employees scattered around the globe, MySQL AB is a very flexible organization that keeps constant tabs on user needs. At its conferences, lead developers get out in front and make themselves available to everyone with a gripe or a new idea. There are also local MySQL user groups in almost every major city. This responsiveness is helped by the fact that MySQL is open and free; any sufficiently skilled programmer can look at the program code to find and perhaps help in fixing problems.
MySQL actually has a dual-license approach: if you want to build your own product around it, you pay MySQL AB a license fee. If you just want to use MySQL to serve your own data, you don’t have to pay the license fee. MySQL also offers technical support, as do numerous other companies and consultants, some of them probably near you.
- Easy interface to other software
It is easy to use MySQL as part of a larger software system. For example, you can write programs that can interact directly with a MySQL database. Most major programming languages have libraries of functions for use with MySQL; these include C, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, and the Microsoft .NET languages. MySQL also supports the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) standard, making it accessible even when MySQL-specific functionality isn’t available.
Get Learning MySQL now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
