Releases
MySQL 8.0 reached its end of life in April 2026; the current long-term support releases are MySQL 8.4 LTS (April 2024, supported until April 2032) and MySQL 9.7 LTS (21st April 2026, supported until April 2034), and since MySQL 26.7.0 (28th July 2026) the Innovation releases use calendar versioning (YY.M). The previous major version, MySQL 5.7, was released in October 2015 and reached its end of life in October 2023.
Version
You can check which version of MySQL database server you use by running the following command in your MySQL prompt:
mysql> SELECT VERSION();
About MySQL
MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). MySQL is arguably the most widely
used server for the popular querying language SQL. It was developed by Michael Widenius.
Essentially what MySQL does is establish a database and then functions under a client-server interaction.
A programmer/analyst can type in commands to the database, most formally known as “statements” that
will do something to call the data in full or in the specifically chosen parts, and it will appear on the
client-side.
Being a server-based service, it does cost quite a bit to host the data if you are a company,
but some functionalities are available for free, with varying degrees of limitations.
MySQL is very useful for business intelligence professionals that handle large groups of sometimes messy
data recorded in real-time. This is why the enterprise versions exist and they are still as relevant
as when they were first released in May of 1995. Nevertheless, MySQL has applications in e-commerce
recording sales information, and also some tracking of visitors, which allows a smart programmer/analyst
to extract immense value from a very basic version of MySQL. As you might infer, MySQL also has applications
in the more academic data analysis field, and there are even online courses by prominent universities
that teach people how to use MySQL for these purposes.
MySQL is used by very technologically-driven, data-heavy companies like UBER or Airbnb, which goes
to show how reliable and powerful the enterprise features are. Some of these features include scalability
of speed and size on demand, which is a crucial thing to have in a rapidly evolving environment.
It runs 24x7, which is important when working across different time zones.
Also, the security of MySQL is very advanced, meaning that many companies prefer to use it for safety reasons.
MySQL is also optimized for extremely fast performance, even when gathering millions of queries a day from busy
websites
(like UBER or Airbnb as we discussed), it can rapidly process and clean data for analysts to interpret
and generate valuable information from.
MySQL has a very notable fork, developed by the same person, Michael Widenius, called MariaDB.
If you would like to explore some differences between MariaDB and MySQL, check out the article
we wrote on this technology.