Use cases of MySQL

MySQL has many advantages because it has its foot in many industries and various use cases across the globe. The importance of MySQL doesn't depend only on how much data you have, it's rather what you are going to do with the data. Data can be sourced and analyzed from unpredictable sources and can be used to address many things.

Let's now look at use cases with real-life importance made on renowned scenarios with the help of MySQL:

The preceding figure helps us understand where MySQL is serving various industries. Though it's not an extensive list of industries where MySQL has been playing a prominent role in business decisions, let's now discuss a few of the industries.

Social media

Social media content is information, and so are engagements such as views, likes, demographics, shares, follows, unique visitors, comments, and downloads. At the end of the day, what matters is how your social media-related efforts contribute to the business.

One notable example is Facebook, where MySQL had been used extensively. On top of MySQL where petabytes of data was used to serve likes, shares, and comments. Facebook has developed the RocksDB storage engine on top of the MySQL InnoDB storage engine, which leverages many advantages of InnoDB storage engine as Facebook wanted to primarily focus on storage optimization. Though currently MySQL is still used largely for other common applications.

Government

The era of MySQL has been playing a significant role in government too; government bodies have been using MySQL extensively because of splendid return on investments and promoting open source. In fact, the government sector is carrying out a huge number of implementations of MySQL worldwide.

This may come as a surprise to you; US Navy uses MySQL for its critical flight planning activities. There are various activities such as weather conditions, flight plans, fuel efficiency, maintenance of flights, and many more that are being tracked with the help of MySQL as the database. It's a no-brainer that it needs to run 24x7 with full redundancy; MySQL was able to achieve this serving US Navy aircraft across the globe.

Media and entertainment

YouTube is also one of the prominent users of MySQL. Anytime you watch a video on YouTube it gets data from a relational database or a blob store using MySQL. YouTube also uses Vitess; a project that was released by YouTube to frontend MySQL. Vitess helps to do lots of optimization and acts as a proxy to serve each database request using MySQL. MySQL replicas are heavily used in YouTube's implementation; leveraging MySQL caching was one of the other prominent factors for YouTube.

Fraud detection

When it comes to security, fraud detection, or compliance, and precisely if your solution helps you in identifying and preventing issues before they strike, then it becomes a sweet spot for business. Most of the time, fraud detection takes place a long time after the fraud has occurred, when you might have already suffered loss. The next steps would be obviously to minimize the impact of fraud and improve areas that could help you prevent this from being repeated.

Many companies who are into any type of transaction processing or claims use fraud detection techniques extensively. MySQL helps to analyze transactions, claims, and so on in real time, along with trends or anomalous behavior to prevent fraudulent activities.

PayPal is one of such use cases that has built fraud detection system using MySQL. PayPal has more than 100 million active users, which is distributed to US, Japanese, and European data centers. High-availability for such use cases is a key criteria along with performance, which MySQL has been able to deliver as expected.

Business mapping

Netflix has millions of subscribers; it uses MySQL for running its billing systems. The core billing system of Netflix on MySQL is a prominent backbone for any business. Netflix has billions of rows of data concurrently updated and of consisting data since its inception two decades ago. Compliance was one of the key factors along with migration from Oracle with minimal downtime; both of these were achieved with MySQL and has been expanding tremendously every other day.

E-commerce

Uber is one of the other well-known customers of MySQL. Uber had been growing enormously worldwide, and scalability, high-availability, and return on investments were a few of the important criteria to be worked upon. Uber uses MySQL as its primary database for its known private car transportation service. Uber heavily uses schema less database architecture as its backend as a layer on MySQL.

There are many real-world MySQL use cases that have changed humanity, technology, predictions, health, science and research, law and order, sports, e-commerce, power and energy, financial trading, robotics, and many more. MySQL is an integral part of our daily routine, which is not evident all the time, but yes, it plays a significant role in what we do in many ways.