MySQL is an open source database system originally developed by Michael Widenius in 1995. It is licensed under the GNU public license, but commercial license options also exist. The system is available for a wide array of platforms and uses the common Structured Query Language (SQL) for executing the database functions. Today MySQL is the most popular open source database in the world. The current version is 4.0.18. The next major version, 5.0, has already reached alpha status. PHP has had native MySQL support since version 3.0. The available functions make development of database driven web applications effortless.

The table structure of the Marmalade 1.0 database is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 - The database structure