MySQL Server 5.1

32 bit

deb for Ubuntu
deb for Debian
rpm for openSuse

64 bit

deb for Ubuntu
deb for Debian
rpm for openSuse

MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user SQL database management system (DBMS) which has more than 11 million installations.

The program runs as a server providing multi-user
access to a number of databases.

MySQL was owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase.
The project's source code is available under terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements.

Libraries for accessing MySQL databases are available in all major programming languages with language-specific APIs.
In addition, an ODBC interface called MyODBC allows additional programming languages that support the ODBC interface to communicate with a MySQL database, such as ASP or ColdFusion.
The MySQL server and official libraries
are mostly implemented in ANSI C/ANSI C++.

MySQL is popular for web applications and acts as the database
component of the LAMP, MAMP, and WAMP platforms (Linux/Mac/Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python), and for open-source bug tracking tools like Bugzilla.

Its popularity for use with web applications is closely tied to the popularity of PHP and Ruby on Rails, which are often combined with MySQL. PHP and MySQL are essential components for running popular content management systems such as Joomla!, e107, WordPress, Drupal, and some BitTorrent trackers. Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki software,
which is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database.

Information on using MySQL can be found on the company's site, under their Documentation section. There are also many books written about MySQL.

To administer MySQL databases one can use the included command-line tool (commands: mysql and mysqladmin).
Also downloadable from Free Penguin Download are GUI administration tools: MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser.
Both of the GUI tools are now included in one package called MySQL GUI Tools.

In addition to the above mentioned tools developed by MySQL AB, there are several other commercial and non-commercial tools available. phpMyAdmin is a free software webbased administration interface implemented in PHP.

As of August 2007, MySQL offers MySQL 5.0 in two different variants: the MySQL Community Server and Enterprise Server.

They have a common code base and include the following features:

          * A broad subset of ANSI SQL 99, as well as extensions
          * Cross-platform support
          * Stored procedures
          * Triggers
          * Cursors
          * Updatable Views
          * True VARCHAR support
          * INFORMATION_SCHEMA
          * Strict mode
          * X/Open XA distributed transaction processing (DTP) support; two             phase commit as part of this, using Oracle's InnoDB engine
          * Independent storage engines (MyISAM for read speed, InnoDB for             transactions and referential integrity, MySQL Archive for storing             historical data in little space)
          * Transactions with the InnoDB, BDB and Cluster storage engines;             savepoints with InnoDB
          * SSL support
          * Query caching
          * Sub-SELECTs (i.e. nested SELECTs)
          * Replication with one master per slave, many slaves per master, no             automatic support for multiple masters per slave.
          * Full-text indexing and searching using MyISAM engine
          * Embedded database library
          * Partial Unicode support (UTF-8 sequences longer than 3 bytes are             not supported; UCS-2 encoded strings are also limited to the BMP)
          * ACID compliance using the InnoDB, BDB and Cluster engines
          * Shared-nothing clustering through MySQL Cluster

The MySQL Enterprise Server is released once per month and the sources can be obtained either from MySQL's customer-only Enterprise site or from MySQL's BitKeeper repository, both under the GPL license. The MySQL Community Server is published on an unspecified schedule under the GPL and contains all bug fixes that were shipped
with the last MySQL Enterprise Server release.
Binaries are no longer provided by MySQL for
every release of the Community Server.