Next year, MySQL will celebrate its 30th anniversary. I started using MySQL in 2001 when I landed my first job as a web developer. Since that time, I have always had at least one project in production that used MySQL to store and retrieve data on the backend. For this year’s Advent Calendar of Content, we are including a retrospective of MySQL and highlighting some of the major milestones across the years.

1995

MySQL was founded in 1995 by Allan Larsson, David Axmark, and Michael “Monty” Widenius. The first version of MySQL was released in May 1995.

1996

The first external release of MySQL was published in August 1996. This release included features such as multi-threading, a join optimizer that allowed for one-sweep multi-joins, a driver for ODBC, fixed and variable-length records, and multi-key tables. This binary build was only available for Solaris.

In October 1996, version 3.11.1 was released to the public—again, Solaris only. In November, the binaries for Linux 2.0 were released. The following month, a source was released for MySQL.

1997

In January of 1997, version 3.20.6 was released as a beta and was the first beta release of MySQL 3.20. in December of this year, the first MYSQL drivers for PHP were made available to the community.

1998

January  1998 saw the first release of MySQL, which was supported on Microsoft Windows. By May 1998, all MSQL distributions were automatically built and tested using a range of tools over the Internet. December 1998 saw the first time MySQL was included in a Linux distribution—SuSE Linux 6.0.

1999

In January 1999, the official MySQL homepage was moved to the mysql.com domain. In July 1999, O’Reilly Publishing published its first book about MySQL, MySQL & mSQL. July also saw the alpha release of MySQL 3.23, which included support for the MyISAM storage engine.

2000

June 2000 was a significant year for MySQL. With the beta release of MySQL 3.23, the open-source license changed from the MySQL Free Public License to the GNU General Public License (GPL). MySQL was also included in the September release of Red Hat Linux 7.

2001

Version 3.23.31 was released early in 2001 as ” production ready.” This release was the first version of MySQL I used.

2002

A new version of the ODBC driver, version 3.5.1, was released at the end of January. February brought the release of the database benchmark test performed by Ziff Davis. MySQL came out on top of these benchmarks. 2002 also saw the first implementations of the InnoDB storage engine. The first version of “MySQL Connector/J”, a JDBC driver, was added to the product line in August. MySQL AB holds a contest to name the MySQL dolphin mascot. The winner was “Sakila,” which was proposed by Ambrose Twebaze.

2003

March 2003 saw the release of version 4.0.12, the first “production” release of MySQL 4.0, and the launch of the MySQL Certification Program.

2004

MySQL Press is launched with Pearson Education. MySQL 4.1.7 was released. This release includes features such as subqueries and derived tables, a new GUI installer for Linux and Windows, encrypted client-server communication, Unicode support, GIS spatial types, and improved full-text search capabilities.

As we can see, MySQL experienced tremendous growth in its first ten years. In our next retrospective, we will discuss the next ten years of MySQL’s history.