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Amazon RDS for MySQL

What is MySQL?

The world’s most ubiquitous and flexible open source relational database

What is MySQL?

MySQL is the most widely adopted open source relational database and serves as the primary relational data store for many popular websites, applications, and commercial products. With more than 20 years of community-backed development and support, MySQL is a reliable, stable, and secure SQL-based database management system.

The MySQL database is suitable for a wide variety of use cases, including mission critical apps, dynamic websites, and as an embedded database for software, hardware, and appliances.

AWS supports MySQL in a variety of ways, including a fully managed database service, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MySQL. Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition is also built using MySQL and Amazon RDS supports the popular MySQL fork project, MariaDB.

You can also host MySQL on Amazon EC2 and self-manage the database, or browse the 3rd party MySQL offerings on AWS Marketplace.

History of MySQL

The first version of MySQL Server was released in 1995 by the Swedish company MySQL AB, founded by David Axmark, Allan Larsson, and Michael Widenius. MySQL takes its name from Widenius’ daughter, named My. The MySQL project was released as open source in 2000, under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

By 2001, MySQL had reached more than 2 million active installations; by 2004, the software was being downloaded more than 30,000 times a day. MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008 and, when Oracle acquired Sun in 2009, it also took ownership of MySQL. Today, MySQL is the most widely used open source relational database system.

Benefits of using MySQL

Ease-of-use and performanceMySQL database has found favor with web developers due to its ease-of-use and productivity features, including triggers, stored procedures, and updatable views. MySQL includes utilities like mysqldump, a backup program; mysqladmin, an administrative client; and MySQL Workbench, a GUI for management and migration work.

Over time, MySQL has boosted its performance capabilities with features including B-tree disk tables with index compression, thread-based memory allocation, and optimized nested-loop joins. Row-level locking and consistent reads in the storage engine give MySQL additional performance benefits for multi-user concurrency.

MySQL’s InnoDB transactional storage engine adheres to the ACID model, with capabilities that improve data protection, including point-in-time recovery and autocommit. InnoDB offers additional data integrity through support for foreign key constraints, preventing data inconsistencies across tables.

MySQL includes hardened and flexible security features, including host-based verification and encryption of password traffic. InnoDB offers additional security benefits, with data-at-rest tablespace encryption using a two-tier encryption key architecture.

MySQL is available under an open source license (the GNU General Public License) allowing you to freely use and modify the source code. Managed versions of MySQL, like Amazon RDS for MySQL, carry no additional licensing costs.

MySQL’s large, global community of contributors and enthusiasts bring many additional and long-tail benefits to using the database system. For example, the MySQL community stays on top of security issues and bug fixes, contributing to the overall resilience of the software. MySQL user groups, events, forums, and mailing lists provide a built-in network for education and support.

MySQL fork projects

MariaDB

MariaDB is a popular fork of MySQL from MariaDB, which was founded by the original developers of MySQL who intended it to remain free and open source under the GNU GPL. While MariaDB is maintained separately from MySQL, it retains a high degree of MySQL compatibility, including library binary equivalency, and exact matching with APIs. AWS supports MariaDB with the fully managed database service, Amazon RDS for MariaDB.

Percona Server

Percona Server is another popular fork of MySQL from Percona. Percona Server includes XtraDB, Percona's fork of the InnoDB Storage Engine.

Language support

MySQL supports most leading programming languages and protocols, including: Python, Java, Perl, Node.js, .Net, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, C/C++, Tcl, ODBC, and Objective-C.

MySQL vs. PostgreSQL

MySQL and PostgreSQL are both popular open source relational databases. Traditionally, MySQL has been perceived as easy to use and fast, whereas PostgreSQL has been perceived as feature-rich and more comparable to commercial databases like Oracle. However, the current major versions of MySQL and PostgreSQL both offer many robust features and capabilities in the way of performance, reliability, security, and more. You can learn more about  PostgreSQL and try  Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL using the AWS Free Tier.

MySQL hosting options on AWS

Self-managed on MySQL on Amazon EC2

Historically, relational databases have been on-premises, and as database workloads moved to the cloud, organizations initially leveraged Amazon EC2 to run their own databases. With this approach, you have to manage all of the usual administration tasks that accompany an on-premises database such as hardware provisioning, database setup, tuning, patching, backups, and scaling.

Fully managed MySQL on Amazon RDS

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is an easy-to-manage relational database service optimized for total cost of ownership. It is simple to set up, operate, and scale with demand. RDS automates undifferentiated database management tasks, such as provisioning, configuring, backing up, and patching.

RDS allows customers to create a new database in minutes and offers flexibility to customize databases to meet their needs. Customers can optimize performance with features like with two readable standbys, optimized writes and reads, and AWS Graviton3-based instances, and they can choose from multiple pricing options to effectively manage costs.

Modernize with Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition

Amazon Aurora provides unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale for MySQL. Aurora has 5x the throughput of MySQL with full compatibility. Aurora offers broad compliance standards and enterprise security capabilities, and support for globally distributed apps.

Getting started with Amazon RDS for MySQL is simple

1

Sign up for Amazon RDS

Get access to the Amazon RDS Free Tier.

2

Learn with simple tutorials

Discover how to create and connect to a MySQL database using RDS.

3

Start building with Amazon RDS

Start building with Amazon RDSBegin building with help from the MySQL on Amazon RDS user guide.