With its January 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle gained the MySQL open source database management software (DBMS) platform for enterprise IT environments. MySQL is designed to let users ...

MySQL is the second most popular database in use, according the DB-Engines Ranking, and is a key element of the LAMP — Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, PHP — open-source web development stack.

Until now, it has sold support services for a competing open-source database, PostgreSQL. MySQL is one of the most successful open-source companies founded in the past five years.

MySQL is still usually used in small to medium-sized deployments, although it now supports “big database” features such as master-slave deployments, use with Memcached, and horizontal sharding.

As a MySQL developer, you should be at least dimly aware that MySQL supports several database formats. Find out what each is good for and how you use them.