Why MySQL?

In order to fully appreciate the benefits for using MySQL as your organization's primary database, let's first discuss some important facts about MySQL.

MySQL is the world's most popular open source database. With its proven performance, reliability and ease-of-use, MySQL has become the leading database choice for web-based applications, used by high profile web properties including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yahoo! and many more.

Oracle drives MySQL innovation, delivering new capabilities to power next generation web, cloud, mobile and embedded applications.

You may not be aware, but most of the applications installed in your mobile phone is using MySQL as its database. Even those social networking site that you frequently visit is storing most of your information using MySQL.

Suprised?!

But the main questions are, Why MySQL? How will my company benefit from it? Why will I migrate my existing databases to MySQL?

There some things you might need to know about MySQL:

1. It's FREE! MySQL Communition Edition can be downloaded and used freely according to the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Here is the MySQL Download link

2. Performance and Scalability. MySQL is powering some of the most demanding Web-based applications.

As per Oracle, here are some of those companies who run mission critical web-based applications with MySQL as their primary databases:

a. Facebook runs tens of thousands of MySQL servers, a typical instance counting 1 to 2 TB of data. 11.2 Million row changes and 2.5 Billion rows read per second are handled in MySQL.

b. Twitter achieved in August 2013 a new World record of 143,199 Tweets Per Second (TPS). A typical day sees over 500 million tweets, which means about 5,700 per second with MySQL.

c. Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube, served to you via MySQL.

d. PayPal built a globally-distributed database with 100 terabytes of user-related data based on MySQL Cluster.

Other Companies using MySQL:

3. Reliability. MySQL is famous for its rock-solid reliability. Aside from the extensive QA testing at Oracle, companies like Percona and organization like MariaDB are sharing their expertise and help in providing recommendations and improvements.

4. Ease of Use and Administration. MySQL offers quick-start capabilities with the average time from software download to installation completion being less than fifteen minutes.

In Summary, MySQL is a proven and mature product. It has evolved over the past 20 years benefitting from the feedback of millions of developers and DBAs relying on it for the most demanding Web applications in the world, pushing its limits, and contributing in a number of ways to its performance, reliability and ease of use. MySQL is available on all major platforms and has connectors for all key development languages.