Managing & Using MySQL, 2nd Edition

The History of MySQL

This story actually goes back to 1979 when MySQL’s inventor, Michael Widenius (a.k.a. Monty) developed an in-house database tool called UNIREG for managing databases. UNIREG is a tty interface builder that uses a low-level connection to an ISAM storage with indexing. Since then, UNIREG has been rewritten in several different languages and extended to handle big databases. It is still available today, but is largely supplanted by MySQL.

The Swedish company TcX began developing web-based applications in 1994 and used UNIREG to support this effort.^[2] Unfortunately, UNIREG created too much overhead to be successful in dynamically generating web pages. TcX thus began looking at alternatives.

TcX looked at SQL and mSQL.^[3] mSQL was a cheap DBMS that gave away its source code with database licenses—almost open source. At the time, mSQL was still in its 1.x releases and had even fewer features than the currently available version. Most important to Monty, it did not support any indexes. mSQL’s performance was therefore poor in comparison to UNIREG.

Monty contacted David Hughes, the author of mSQL, to see if Hughes would be interested in connecting mSQL to UNIREG’s B+ ISAM handler to provide indexing to mSQL. Hughes was already well on his way to mSQL 2, however, and had his indexing infrastructure in place. TcX decided to create a database server that was more compatible with its requirements.

TcX was smart enough not to try to reinvent the wheel. It built upon UNIREG ...