Do you plan to create a new web site, whether it be intranet or extranet? If yes, you most likely will not think “relational database” at first, do you? Instead, you start thinking about editorial content, collaboration, and user-generated content such as blogging, writing comments, or tagging.

In fact, most public and internal web sites are extensively using a relational database under its cover. Where else would you store all the user profiles or other structured content. Almost all of the current web content management (WCM) systems store their assets in a relational database and in a large number of cases this database is actually MySQL.

MySQL has evolved into the database for the internet! So, why is that – what makes MySQL so popular in the internet community and especially in the open source communities dedicated to assemble the next generation internet applications?
In order to potentially answer that, we will have to look at MySQL’s history for a bit.

MySQL was developed in the mid 1990′s by David Axmark and Michael Widenius. Together with Allan Larsson, the three founded MySQL AB, the company that now develops the database which has a dual licensing model. While still providing a free open source copy for the community, they also sell a commercial professional version of MySQL. In addition, MySQL AB also offers support for the open source version.
In the beginning, MySQL was a relatively simple – if not to say primitive – and easy-to-use database system. These early versions also had very little features of a true relational database all for the benefit of speed and easy management.

However, all of this changed with the release of version 3.23 between 2000 and 2001 when MySQL AB added numerous features making the database a true relational one with all the features and functions expected from it. While still lacking some of the advanced features, this version was the big break-through of the software. As a result of that, most major Linux distributions started to include MySQL into its standard release and many even installed it as part of its default configuration.
Another important contribution to its wide adoption was the fact that Zend, the makers of PHP, one of the most popular language for internet applications, embraced MySQL early on and provided good integration capabilities for PHP developers.

Today, all major Linux and BSD-like (like the Mac OS X) operating systems usually bundle the latest and greatest version of MySQL (the currently stable version is at 5.0 with 5.1 in late beta and 6.0 in an early alpha release).

So, the today well-known LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) or WAMP (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP) stacks were “born”.

Today, its continuous and still increasing popularity is tied to the popularity of PHP and Ruby on Rails where MySQL is considered the standard component for data storage. Also, most of the very popular open source content management systems, such as Drupal, Alfresco, Joomla!, and WordPress run on MySQL as their preferred database.

This makes MySQL a perfect choice for assembling the latest and greatest Next Generation Internet (NGI) applications (or commonly referred to as “Web 2.0″). Developers find a wealth of open source software packages, frameworks (such as symfony for PHP, Ruby on Rails, Django for Python, and Spring/Hibernate), and low-level components fully supporting MySQL providing an overwhelmingly rich set of tools, features, and functionality to the community that assembles these NGI applications.