MySQL is a well-known open source structured database because of its performance, easiness to use, and reliability. This is the most common choice of web applications for a relational database. In the current market, thousands of web-based applications rely on MySQL including giant industries such as Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia. It has also proven to be the database choice for Software as a Service (SaaS) based applications such as Twitter, YouTube, SugarCRM, Supply Dynamics, Workday, RightNow, Omniture, Zimbra, and many more. We will discuss this in detail in the use cases of MySQL section later in the chapter. MySQL was developed by MySQL AB, a Swedish company, and now it is distributed and supported by Oracle Corporation. MySQL carries a valuable history with it.
MySQL has continued to improve in order to become an enterprise-level database management system. MySQL 8 is expected to be a game-changer as today we are in the age of digitization. MySQL 8 is all tuned to serve many new use cases that in prior versions were difficult to achieve. Some of the use cases an enormous amount of data is produced are social networking, e-commerce, bank/credit card transactions, emails, data stored on the cloud, and so on. Analysis of all such structured, unstructured, or semi-structured ubiquitous data helps to discover hidden patterns, market trends, correlations, personal preferences.
- James Truslow Adams
Let's take an in-depth look at MySQL 8 new features, benefits, use cases along with a few limitations of MySQL 8 after we have an overview of MySQL. This is going to be exciting, let's get prepared.