MySQL is a fast, easy-to-use RDBMS being used for many small and big businesses. MySQL is developed, marketed, and supported by MySQL AB, which is a Swedish company. MySQL is becoming so popular because of many good reasons.

MySQL is released under an open-source license. So you have nothing to pay to use it. MySQL is a very powerful program in its own right. It handles a large subset of the functionality of the most expensive and powerful database packages.

MySQL uses a standard form of the well-known SQL data language. MySQL works on many operating systems and with many languages including PHP, PERL, C, C++, JAVA, etc. MySQL works very quickly and works well even with large data sets. MySQL is very friendly to PHP, the most appreciated language for web development. MySQL supports large databases, up to 50 million rows or more in a table. The default file size limit for a table is 4GB, but you can increase this (if your operating system can handle it) to a theoretical limit of 8 million terabytes (TB). MySQL is customizable. The open-source GPL license allows programmers to modify the MySQL software to fit their own specific environments.