Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

One of the big changes in business software over the last decade has been the introduction of Open Source Database Management Systems (DBMS) as back ends to large corporate data systems. There was a time not long ago when all corporate databases of all sizes ran on proprietary DBMS software such as Oracle, DB2, Informix, and Sybase. Now much business software may be run using MySQL.

MySQL was initially released in the late nineties, and has grown into today’s most frequently used Open Source DBMS software. If you surf the Web, you almost certainly interact with MySQL databases regularly. As an example, MySQL is the database that underlies all of the millions of WordPress blogs and almost all of the Open Source content management systems. As another example, Wikipedia runs on MySQL. It has become a powerhouse DBMS. MySQL is offered under the GNU General Public License.

Although it is written primarily in C and C++, MySQL access libraries are available for most major computer languges, usually provided as an application programming interface (API) for each specific language. MySQL runs on most major computer platforms, including AIX, BSDi, FreeBSD, HP-UX, i5/OS, Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Novell NetWare, OpenBSD, OS/2 Warp, QNX, IRIX, Solaris, SunOS, SCO OpenServer, SCO UnixWare, Tru64, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP. It is versatile, to say the least.

Tomorrow, more detail about functionality.