General description of MySQL MySQL was a free-software database engine originally developed and first released in 1995. MySQL is named after My, the daughter Michael Widenius, of one of the product’s originators. It was originally produced under the GNU General Public License, in which source code is made freely available. MySQL was originally owned by Sun Microsystems; when the company was purchased by Oracle Corp. in 2010, MySQL was part of the package. Although MySQL is technically considered a competitor of Oracle DB, Oracle DB is mainly used by large enterprises, while MySQL is used by smaller, more Web-oriented databases. In addition, MySQL differs from Oracle's product because it's in the public domain. MySQL can be used for a variety of applications, but is most commonly found on Web servers. A website that uses MySQL may include Web pages that access information from a database. These pages are often referred to as "dynamic," meaning the content of ea...