MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My. The SQL phrase stands for Structured Query Language. MySQL is a popular choice of database for use in web applications, and is a central component of the widely used LAMP web application software stack - LAMP is an acronym for "Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python". MySQL is written in C and C++. Its SQL parser is written in yacc, and a home-brewed lexical analyzer named sql_lex.cc. MySQL works on many different system platforms, including AIX, BSDi, FreeBSD, HP-UX, eComStation, i5/OS, IRIX, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, NetBSD, Novell NetWare, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, OS/2 Warp, QNX, Solaris, Symbian, SunOS, SCO OpenServer, SCO UnixWare, Sanos and Tru64. A port of MySQL to OpenVMS also exists.

MySQL Community Server Features

• A broad subset of ANSI SQL 99, as well as extensions
• Cross-platform support
• Stored procedures
• Triggers
• Cursors
• Updatable Views
• True Varchar support
• Information schema
• Strict mode
• X/Open XA distributed transaction processing (DTP) support; two phase commit as part of this, using Oracle's InnoDB engine
• Independent storage engines (MyISAM for read speed, InnoDB for transactions and referential integrity, MySQL Archive for storing historical data in little space)
• Transactions with the InnoDB, BDB and Cluster storage engines; savepoints with InnoDB
• SSL support
• Query caching
• Sub-SELECTs (i.e. nested SELECTs)
• Replication support (i.e. Master-Master Replication & Master-Slave Replication) with one master per slave, many slaves per master, no automatic support for multiple masters per slave.
• Full-text indexing and searching using MyISAM engine
• Embedded database library
• Partial Unicode support (UTF-8 and UCS-2 encoded strings are limited to the BMP)
• Partial ACID compliance (full compliance only when using the non-default storage engines InnoDB, BDB and Cluster)
• Partititoned tables with pruning of partitions in optimiser
• Shared-nothing clustering through MySQL Cluster
• Hot backup (via mysqlhotcopy) under certain conditions

For more information please visit http://www.mysql.com and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL

Updates : MySQL Server Updates