MySQL at 30: Still important but no longer king

This month MySQL turns 30. Once the bedrock of web development, MySQL remains immensely popular. But as MySQL enters its fourth decade, it ironically has sown the seeds of its own decline, especially relative to Postgres. Oracle, the steward over MySQL since 2010, may proclaim MySQL is “the world’s favorite database,” but that has been objectively false for a long time, as shown by developer sentiment surveys and popularity rankings from Stack Overflow and DB-Engines.

None of which is to deprecate MySQL’s importance. It was and is critical infrastructure for the web. But it’s no longer developers’ default database for most things. How did this happen?

For years, MySQL was the go-to database of the internet. Born as a lightweight, open source alternative to expensive commercial systems, MySQL made it easy to build on the web. It powered the rise of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. It was simple, fast, and free. But over time, the very things that made MySQL dominant came to constrain its growth. Its focus on simplicity made it easy to learn, but hard to evolve. Its permissive early design helped it spread fast but also left it ill-suited to modern, complex applications. Its dominant position left it less hungry for innovation than PostgreSQL, a database that has relentlessly closed gaps and added new capabilities.

The rise of MySQL in the web era

MySQL’s origin story is rooted in the early open source movement. In 1995, Swedish developer Michael “Monty” Widenius created MySQL as an internal project, releasing it to the public soon after. By 2000, MySQL was fully open sourced (GPL license), and its popularity exploded. As the database component of the LAMP stack, MySQL offered an irresistible combination for web developers: It was free, easy to install, and “good enough” to back dynamic websites. In an era dominated by expensive proprietary databases, MySQL’s arrival was perfectly timed. Web startups of the 2000s—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and countless others—embraced MySQL to store user data and content. MySQL quickly became synonymous with building websites.

Early MySQL gained traction despite some trade-offs. In its youth, MySQL lacked certain “enterprise” features (like full SQL compliance or transactions in its default engine), but this simplicity was a feature, not a bug, for many users. It made MySQL blazingly fast for reads and simple queries and easier to manage for newcomers. Developers could get a MySQL database running with minimal fuss—a contrast to heavier systems like Oracle or even PostgreSQL at the time. “It’s hard to compete with easy,” I observed in 2022.

By the mid-2000s, MySQL was everywhere and was increasingly feature-rich. The database had matured (adding InnoDB, a more robust storage engine for transactions) and continued to ride the web explosion. Even as newer databases emerged, MySQL remained a default choice for millions of deployments, from small business applications to large-scale web infrastructure. As of 2025, MySQL is likely still the widest-deployed open source (or proprietary) database globally by sheer volume of installations. Scads of applications were written with MySQL as the backing store, and many remain in active use. In this sense, MySQL today is a bit like IBM’s DB2: a workhorse database with a massive installed base that isn’t disappearing, even if it’s no longer the trendiest choice.

Momentum shifts elsewhere

In the past decade, MySQL’s once-unquestioned dominance of open source databases has faced strong headwinds from both relatively new contenders (MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch) and old (Postgres). From my vantage point at MongoDB, I’ve seen a large influx of developers turn to MongoDB to more flexibly build web and other applications. But it’s Postgres that has become the “easy button” for developers who want to stick to SQL but need more capabilities than MySQL affords.

Whereas web developers in 2005 might have reached for MySQL for virtually any project, today they have a plethora of choices tailored to specific needs. Need a flexible JSON document store to support general-purpose database needs? MongoDB beckons. Building real-time analytics or full-text search? Elasticsearch could be a better fit. Looking for an in-memory cache or high-speed data structure store? Redis is there. Even in data analytics and data warehousing, cloud-native options such as Snowflake and BigQuery have taken off.

But it’s Postgres that can take the credit (or blame, if you prefer) for MySQL’s decline. The reasons for this are both technical and cultural. Postgres offers capabilities MySQL historically has not. Among them:

Richer SQL features and standards compliance: PostgreSQL has long prioritized SQL standards and advanced features. It supports complex queries, window functions, common table expressions, full-text search, and robust ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) transactions, some of which MySQL lacked or added only later. Postgres can handle complex, enterprise-grade workloads without bending the rules.

Extensibility and flexibility: Postgres is highly extensible. You can define new data types, index types, and even write custom extensions or stored procedures in various languages. Whether it’s GIS/geospatial data (PostGIS), time-series extensions, or pgcrypto and pgvector extensions for crypto and AI use cases, Postgres can morph to fit needs. These extensibility hooks have let Postgres stay on the cutting edge, even when these extensions may offer demonstrably worse performance for modern applications. Postgres’ extensibility still shines compared to MySQL’s more limited plug-in model.

Open source, open culture: Both MySQL and Postgres are open source, but PostgreSQL’s license and governance are more permissive. Postgres is a true community-driven project, developed by a core global team and supported by many companies without a single owner. MySQL, by contrast, uses GPL (for the open version) and has been owned by Oracle for years. Oracle’s stewardship has been a double-edged sword. On one hand, Oracle has undoubtedly invested in MySQL’s development. The current MySQL 8.x series is a far cry from the MySQL of the 2000s. It’s a much more robust, feature-rich database (with improvements in replication, security, GIS, JSON support, and more) thanks in part to Oracle’s engineering resources. But that same tight control of MySQL engineering has altered the MySQL community dynamics in ways that arguably have slowed its momentum.

In short, PostgreSQL has convinced many that it offers more “future-proof” value than MySQL.

MySQL will persist

Despite all the challenges, MySQL will be with us for a long, long time. There are good reasons many developers and organizations stick with MySQL even as alternatives rise. First and foremost is MySQL’s track record of reliability at scale. It has proven itself capable of handling enormous workloads. The Facebooks and Twitters of the world did not outgrow MySQL so much as bend MySQL to their will through custom tools and careful engineering. If MySQL could power the data needs of a social network with billions of users, it can probably handle your e-commerce site or internal application just fine. That pedigree counts for a lot.

Secondly, MySQL remains simple and familiar to legions of developers. It’s often the first relational database new developers learn, thanks to its prevalence in tutorials and boot camps, and its integration with beginner-friendly tools. MySQL’s documentation is extensive, and its error messages and behaviors are well-known. In many cases, developers don’t need the advanced features of PostgreSQL, and MySQL’s lighter footprint (and yes, sometimes forgiving nature with SQL syntax) can make development feel faster. The old perception that “MySQL is easier” still lingers, even if PostgreSQL has improved its ease of use over the years. This familiarity creates inertia: Organizations have MySQL DBAs, MySQL backup scripts, and MySQL monitoring already in place. Switching is hard.

There’s also an ecosystem lock-in of sorts. Hundreds of popular web applications and platforms are built on MySQL (or its drop-in cousin MariaDB). For example, WordPress, which powers a huge portion of websites globally, uses MySQL/MariaDB as its database layer. Many other content management systems, e-commerce platforms, and appliances have a MySQL dependency. This entrenched base means MySQL continues to be deployed by default as people set up those tools. Even cloud providers, while they enthusiastically offer PostgreSQL, also offer fully managed MySQL services (often MySQL-compatible services such as Amazon Aurora) to cater to demand. In short, MySQL is deeply embedded in the infrastructure of the web, and that isn’t undone overnight.

A triumph of open source

However, the very reasons MySQL persists also threaten its future loyalty. MySQL’s widespread legacy use means it will remain relevant, but new projects are increasingly likely to choose something else, whether that’s PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, or whatever you prefer. The risk for MySQL is that a new generation of developers may simply not develop the same attachment to it. Momentum matters in technology communities: PostgreSQL has it; MySQL a bit less so.

Additionally, if MySQL doesn’t keep up with new trends, it could see even loyal users exploring alternatives. For instance, when developers started caring about embeddings and vector search for AI applications, Postgres had an answer with pgvector, and MongoDB added Atlas Vector Search. MySQL had nothing comparable until very recently. MySQL’s continued evolution will be crucial to maintaining loyalty, and that again ties back to how Oracle and the MySQL community navigate the project’s direction in the coming years.

As MySQL turns 30, we should celebrate the incredible legacy of this open source database. Few software projects have had such a profound impact on an era of computing. MySQL empowered an entire generation of developers to build dynamic websites and applications, lowering the barrier to entry for startups and open source projects alike. MySQL demonstrated that open source infrastructure could compete with—and even surpass—proprietary solutions, reshaping the database industry’s economics. For that, MySQL will always deserve credit.

MySQL’s glory days might be behind it, but its story is far from over. The database world is better off for the 30 years of competition and innovation that MySQL inspired and continues to inspire.