Tutorial

What is MySQL?

Published on December 14, 2020
What is MySQL?

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system. As with other relational databases, MySQL stores data in tables made up of rows and columns. Users can define, manipulate, control, and query data using Structured Query Language, more commonly known as SQL. MySQL’s name is a combination of “My,” the name of MySQL creator Michael Widenius’s daughter, and “SQL”.

A flexible and powerful program, MySQL is the most popular open-source database system in the world. As part of the widely-used LAMP technology stack (which consists of a Linux-based operating system, the Apache web server, a MySQL database, and PHP for processing), it’s used to store and retrieve data in a wide variety of popular applications, websites, and services.

For more educational resources related to MySQL, please visit:

A complete list of our educational resources on MySQL can be found on our MySQL tag page.

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about us


About the authors
Default avatar

Manager, Developer Education

Technical Writer @ DigitalOcean

Still looking for an answer?

Ask a questionSearch for more help

Was this helpful?
 
Leave a comment


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Join the Tech Talk
Success! Thank you! Please check your email for further details.

Please complete your information!

Featured on Community

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel