According to a recent article from InfoWorld, a consulting firm has employed a tracking system to determine which database is the most popular. The rankings were obtained by considering trend-related data such as mentions on websites, technical discussions and job postings. What the firm found was that, while Oracle is still the top-rated database, open source options are closing in. In particular, MySQL is closing in.
The fact that MySQL is ranked second and the fourth ranked database, Postgres, is also trending upward shows a specific trend itself, the article states. Open source solutions, on the whole, are gaining popularity over proprietary products. It's an interesting notation, considering the fact that MySQL is an Oracle project.
To that end, Oracle has been busy in recent months with more than 200 revamps to the MySQL user interface with its community edition of the Workbench administration software. The new update provides ease in managing schemas, can now display the results of queries as common/value pair lists and reduces the workload and increases the usability for some of the program's common applications.
The community edition of the MySQL Workbench is free of charge to users via the open source GPL. There is also the enterprise edition, which is available by subscription and features many exclusive features such as backups that are scheduled and run by the backup utility and automated data restoration.
If you're interested in whether MySQL is the database that will best meet your needs, contact us. We'd be happy to talk to you about it.