MySQL

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MySQL (pronounced "my S-Q-L") is a multithreaded, multi-user SQL database management system (DBMS) that has more than 11 million installations. The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.

Originally financed in a similar fashion to the JBoss model, MySQL was owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase. The project's source code is available under terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements.

MySQL is popular for web applications and acts as the database component of the LAMP, MAMP, and WAMP platforms (Linux/Mac/Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python), and for open-source bug tracking tools like Bugzilla. Its popularity for use with web applications is closely tied to the popularity of PHP and Ruby on Rails, which are often combined with MySQL. PHP and MySQL are essential components for running popular content management systems such as Joomla!, e107, WordPress, and Drupal. Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki software, which is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database.