MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS).Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter,and "SQL", the abbreviation for Structured Query Language.

MySQL is free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License,and is also available under a variety of proprietary licenses. MySQL was owned and sponsored by the Swedish company MySQL AB, which was bought by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation).In 2010, when Oracle acquired Sun, Widenius forked the open-source MySQL project to create MariaDB.

MySQL is a component of the LAMP web application software stack (and others), which is an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python. MySQL is used by many database-driven web applications, including Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, and WordPress. MySQL is also used by many popular websites, including Facebook,[Flickr,MediaWiki, Twitter,and YouTube.

Limitations
When using some storage engines other than the default of InnoDB, MySQL does not comply with the full SQL standard for some of the implemented functionality, including foreign key references.Check constraints are parsed but ignored by all storage engines before MySQL version 8.0.15.

Up until MySQL 5.7, triggers are limited to one per action / timing, meaning that at most one trigger can be defined to be executed after an INSERT operation, and one before INSERT on the same table.No triggers can be defined on views.

MySQL database's inbuilt functions like UNIX_TIMESTAMP() will return 0 after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.Recently, there had been an attempt to solve the problem which had been assigned to the internal queue.

Deployment
MySQL can be built and installed manually from source code, but it is more commonly installed from a binary package unless special customizations are required. On most Linux distributions, the package management system can download and install MySQL with minimal effort, though further configuration is often required to adjust security and optimization settings.
LAMP software bundle, displayed here together with Squid.

Though MySQL began as a low-end alternative to more powerful proprietary databases, it has gradually evolved to support higher-scale needs as well. It is still most commonly used in small to medium scale single-server deployments, either as a component in a LAMP-based web application or as a standalone database server. Much of MySQL's appeal originates in its relative simplicity and ease of use, which is enabled by an ecosystem of open source tools such as phpMyAdmin. In the medium range, MySQL can be scaled by deploying it on more powerful hardware, such as a multi-processor server with gigabytes of memory.

There are, however, limits to how far performance can scale on a single server ('scaling up'), so on larger scales, multi-server MySQL ('scaling out') deployments are required to provide improved performance and reliability. A typical high-end configuration can include a powerful master database which handles data write operations and is replicated to multiple slaves that handle all read operations.The master server continually pushes binlog events to connected slaves so in the event of failure a slave can be promoted to become the new master, minimizing downtime. Further improvements in performance can be achieved by caching the results from database queries in memory using memcached, or breaking down a database into smaller chunks called shards which can be spread across a number of distributed server clusters.

Backup software
Mysqldump is a logical backup tool included with both community and enterprise editions of MySQL. It supports backing up from all storage engines. MySQL Enterprise Backup is a hot backup utility included as part of the MySQL Enterprise subscription from Oracle, offering native InnoDB hot backup, as well as backup for other storage engines.

XtraBackup is an open-source MySQL hot backup software program. Features include hot, non-locking backups for InnoDB storage, incremental backups, streaming, parallel-compressed backups, throttling based on the number of I/O operations per second, etc

High availability software
Oracle MySQL offers a high availability solution with a mix of tools including the MySQL router and the MySQL shell. They are based on Group Replication, open source tools.

Cloud deployment
MySQL can also be run on cloud computing platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Some common deployment models for MySQL on the cloud are:

Virtual machine image
In this implementation, cloud users can upload a machine image of their own with MySQL installed, or use a ready-made machine image with an optimized installation of MySQL on it, such as the one provided by Amazon EC2.

MySQL as a service
Some cloud platforms offer MySQL "as a service". In this configuration, application owners do not have to install and maintain the MySQL database on their own. Instead, the database service provider takes responsibility for installing and maintaining the database, and application owners pay according to their usage.Notable cloud-based MySQL services are the Amazon Relational Database Service; Oracle MySQL Cloud Service, Azure Database for MySQL, Rackspace; HP Converged Cloud; Heroku, Jelastic and ScaleGrid for MySQL. (Note In this model the database service provider takes responsibility for maintaining the host and database).

User interfaces
Graphical user interfaces
A graphical user interface (GUI) is a type of interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices or programs through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation, as opposed to text-based interfaces, typed command labels or text navigation. GUIs are easier to learn than command-line interfaces (CLIs), which require commands to be typed on the keyboard.

Third-party proprietary and free graphical administration applications (or "front ends") are available that integrate with MySQL and enable users to work with database structure and data visually. Some well-known front ends are: 

MySQL Workbench

• MySQL Workbench is the official integrated environment for MySQL. It was developed by MySQL AB, and enables users to graphically administer MySQL databases and visually design database structures. MySQL Workbench replaces the previous package of software, MySQL GUI Tools. Similar to other third-party packages, but still considered the authoritative MySQL front end, MySQL Workbench lets users manage database design & modeling, SQL development (replacing MySQL Query Browser) and Database administration (replacing MySQL Administrator).
• MySQL Workbench is available in two editions, the regular free and open source Community Edition which may be downloaded from the MySQL website, and the proprietary Standard Edition which extends and improves the feature set of the Community Edition.

Adminer
Adminer (formerly known as phpMinAdmin) is a free MySQL front end for managing content in MySQL databases (since version 2, it also works on PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite and Oracle databases). Adminer is distributed under the Apache License (or GPL v2) in the form of a single PHP file (around 300 KiB in size), and is capable of managing multiple databases, with many CSS skins available. Its author is Jakub Vrána who started to develop this tool as a light-weight alternative to phpMyAdmin, in July 2007.

ClusterControl
ClusterControl is an end-to-end MySQL management system GUI that provides the ability to deploy, monitor, manage and scale MySQL instances from a single interface. It is developed by Severalnines.
The Community version of ClusterControl is free to use and lets the user deploy and monitor their MySQL instances. Advanced features like load balancing, backup & restore, failover, etc are part of a paid offering.

Database Workbench
Database Workbench is a software application for development and administration of multiple relational databases using SQL, with interoperationality between different database systems, developed by Upscene Productions.
Because Databases Workbench supports multiple database systems, it can provide software developers with the same interface and development environment for these otherwise different database systems and also includes cross database tools.
Database Workbench supports the following relational databases: Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Anywhere, Firebird, NexusDB, InterBase, MySQL and MariaDB. Database Workbench 5 runs on 32-bit or 64-bit Windows platforms. Under Linux, FreeBSD or macOS Database Workbench can operate using Wine.

DBeaver
DBeaver is an SQL client and a database administration tool. DBeaver includes extended support of following databases: MySQL and MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2 (LUW), Exasol, SQL Server, Sybase, Firebird, Teradata, Vertica, Apache Phoenix, Netezza, Informix, Apache Derby, H2, SQLite and any other database which has a JDBC or ODBC driver. DBeaver is free and open source software that is distributed under the Apache License 2.0. The source code is hosted on GitHub.

DBEdit
DBEdit is a database editor, which can connect to an Oracle, DB2, MySQL and any database that provides a JDBC driver. It runs on Windows, Linux and Solaris. DBEdit is free and open source software and distributed under the GNU General Public License. The source code is hosted on SourceForge.

HeidiSQL
HeidiSQL, previously known as MySQL-Front, is a free and open source client, or frontend for MySQL (and for its forks like MariaDB and Percona Server), Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL. HeidiSQL is developed by German programmer Ansgar Becker and a few other contributors in Delphi. To manage databases with HeidiSQL, users must login to a local or remote MySQL server with acceptable credentials, creating a session. Within this session users may manage MySQL Databases within the connected MySQL server, disconnecting from the server when done. Its feature set is sufficient for most common and advanced database, table and data record operations but remains in active development to move towards the full functionality expected in a MySQL Frontend.

LibreOffice Base
LibreOffice Base allows the creation and management of databases, preparation of forms and reports that provide end users easy access to data. Like Microsoft Access, it can be used as a front-end for various database systems, including Access databases (JET), ODBC data sources, and MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Navicat
Navicat is a series of graphical database management and development software produced by PremiumSoft CyberTech Ltd. for MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQLite, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server. It has an Explorer-like graphical user interface and supports multiple database connections for local and remote databases. Its design is made to meet the needs of a variety of audiences, from database administrators and programmers to various businesses/companies that serve clients and share information with partners.
Navicat is a cross-platform tool and works on Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux platforms. Upon purchase, users are able to select a language for the software from eight available languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org Base is freely available and can manage MySQL databases if the entire suite is installed.

phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin is a free and open source tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL with the use of a web browser. It can perform various tasks such as creating, modifying or deleting databases, tables, fields or rows; executing SQL statements; or managing users and permissions. The software, which is available in 78 languages,is maintained by The phpMyAdmin Project.
It can import data from CSV and SQL, and transform stored data into any format using a set of predefined functions, like displaying BLOB-data as images or download-links.    

Sequel Pro
Sequel Pro is a free and open-source MacOS application for working with MySQL databases locally or remotely. It uses the freemium model, where the Gratis users are actually getting features to most of the basic services. It takes a SQL Table itself to manage these requests. It can handle the new "fun" UTF-8 features for newer unicode as well as having multiple GB tables without issue. 

SQLBuddy
SQLBuddy is an open-source web-based application written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL and SQLite with the use of a Web browser. The project places an emphasis on ease of installation and a simple user interface.

SQLyog
SQLyog is a GUI tool available in free as well as paid versions. Data manipulations (e.g., insert, update, and delete) may be done from a spreadsheet-like interface. Its editor has syntax highlighting and various automatic formatting options. Both raw table data and a result set from a query can be manipulated. Its data search feature uses Google-like search syntax and translates to SQL transparently for the user. It has a backup tool for performing unattended backups. Backups may be compressed and optionally stored as a file-per-table as well as identified with a timestamp.

Toad for MySQL
Toad for MySQL is a software application from Dell Software that database developers, database administrators and data analysts use to manage both relational and non-relational databases using SQL. Toad supports many databases and environments. It runs on all 32-bit/64-bit Windows platforms, including Microsoft Windows Server, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and 8 (32-Bit or 64-Bit). Dell Software has also released a Toad Mac Edition. Dell provides Toad in commercial and trial/freeware versions. The freeware version is available from the ToadWorld.com community.

Webmin
Webmin is a web-based system configuration tool for Unix-like systems, although recent versions can also be installed and run on Windows. With it, it is possible to configure operating system internals, such as users, disk quotas, services or configuration files, as well as modify and control open source apps, such as the Apache HTTP Server, PHP or MySQL.
Webmin is largely based on Perl, running as its own process and web server. It defaults to TCP port 10000 for communicating, and can be configured to use SSL if OpenSSL is installed with additional required Perl modules.
It is built around modules, which have an interface to the configuration files and the Webmin server. This makes it easy to add new functionality. Due to Webmin's modular design, it is possible for anyone who is interested to write plugins for desktop configuration.
Webmin also allows for controlling many machines through a single interface, or seamless login on other webmin hosts on the same subnet or LAN.

Command-line interfaces
A command-line interface is a means of interacting with a computer program where the user issues commands to the program by typing in successive lines of text (command lines). MySQL ships with many command line tools, from which the main interface is the mysql client.

MySQL Utilities is a set of utilities designed to perform common maintenance and administrative tasks. Originally included as part of the MySQL Workbench, the utilities are a stand-alone download available from Oracle.

Percona Toolkit is a cross-platform toolkit for MySQL, developed in Perl.Percona Toolkit can be used to prove replication is working correctly, fix corrupted data, automate repetitive tasks, and speed up servers. Percona Toolkit is included with several Linux distributions such as CentOS and Debian, and packages are available for Fedora and Ubuntu as well. Percona Toolkit was originally developed as Maatkit, but as of late 2011, Maatkit is no longer developed.

MySQL shell is a tool for interactive use and administration of the MySQL database. It supports JavaScript, Python or SQL modes and it can be used for administration and access purposes.

Application programming interfaces
Many programming languages with language-specific APIs include libraries for accessing MySQL databases. These include MySQL Connector/Net for integration with Microsoft's Visual Studio (languages such as C# and VB are most commonly used) and the JDBC driver for Java. In addition, an ODBC interface called MySQL Connector/ODBC allows additional programming languages that support the ODBC interface to communicate with a MySQL database, such as ASP or ColdFusion. The HTSQL – URL-based query method also ships with a MySQL adapter, allowing direct interaction between a MySQL database and any web client via structured URLs. Other drivers exists for languages like Python or Node.js.

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