MySQL
MySQL is stewarded by Oracle Corporation, which acquired it in the 2010 Sun Microsystems buyout — the same event that pushed founder Michael Widenius to fork MariaDB. Community Edition is GPLv2, free at any scale; commercial Enterprise Edition runs $5,350-$16,050/server/year for 1-4 sockets and $10,700-$32,100 for 5+ (Oracle's own price list, socket-based not core-based). Oracle shipped MySQL 9.7 as the current LTS release (GA April 21, 2026), moving previously Enterprise-only features — the Hypergraph Optimizer and JSON Duality Views' DML support — into Community Edition, while adding a new Enterprise-only capability, Dynamic Data Masking. Its InnoDB engine still clusters tables on the primary key and uses row-level locking. On DB-Engines' March 2026 scoring, MySQL sits at 858 points to Oracle DB's 1,182 — but lost roughly 130 points year-over-year as PostgreSQL gained ground. Current version/status: MySQL 9.7 LTS (GA April 21, 2026) is the current long-term-support line; 9.6 (Jan 2026) is the latest quarterly Innovation release; MySQL 8.0 (2018) remains the most widely deployed version in existing production systems. License: GPLv2 (Community Edition, open source); commercial Enterprise/Standard/Cluster Carrier Grade editions dual-licensed under a proprietary Oracle commercial license. Pricing: Community Edition: free, no license fee, production-usable at any scale. Enterpris
Pick MySQL when you're shipping a standard web CRUD app — WordPress, e-commerce, a SaaS backend — on a stack where hosting, ORMs, and the hiring pool all assume it by default; its replication story and operational simplicity for that job are hard to beat. Don't pick it for analytics-heavy, JSON-document-heavy, or constraint-heavy schemas — take PostgreSQL instead, which now beats MySQL by nearly 19 points among professional developers in Stack Overflow's 2025 survey, a lead that's been widening since Postgres first pulled ahead there in 2024. Honest weakness the community flags loudest: Oracle gutted MySQL engineering in September 2025 layoffs, and 9.7 LTS is explicitly framed as a trust-rebuilding release — a database playing defense on its own stewardship, not a strength position. Known weakness: Oracle's September 2025 layoffs cut deep into the MySQL engineering team, feeding long-standing community distrust of Oracle's stewardship; MySQL 9.7 LTS was explicitly pitched by Oracle's own product director as a trust-rebuilding, community-feedback-loop release rather than a technical leap. Meanwhile PostgreSQL leads it by 18.6 points among professional developers in Stack Overflow's
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