MySQL is the world's most widely used relational database management system that runs on a server and provides multi-user access to multiple databases. The MySQL source code is publicly available under the GNU GPU license. MySQL is owned and sponsored by the Swedish company MySQL AB. The current owner of MySQL is Oracle Corporation.

MySQL runs in both free and paid versions. For commercial projects, there are paid editions that offer extended functionality.

The MySQL database system is used by some of the most famous and most visited websites ever. These include, for example, Google, Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and others. MySQL is a popular choice for web databases and is most commonly used in a software package dubbed LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.

MySQL is written in C, C++, yacc and sql_lex.cc.

At its base, MySQL does not include any graphical user interface for managing databases or for dealing with the data itself. Thus, users can use the command line, or they can use one of the graphical extensions. These exist both as classic desktop software programs and as web applications.

But there is also an official graphical user interface, which is available for free and was developed by MySQL AB. This is called MySQL Workbench (translated as „MySQL workbench“). MySQL Workbench has replaced the earlier MySQL GUI Tools package.

MySQL can be deployed both locally and in the cloud, for example on Amazon EC2.