MySQL has stand-alone clients that allow users to interact directly with a MySQL database using SQL, but more often, MySQL is used with other programs to implement applications that need relational database capability. In 2010, when Oracle acquired Sun, Widenius forked the open-source MySQL project to create MariaDB. MySQL was owned and sponsored by the Swedish company MySQL AB, which was bought by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation). MySQL is free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and is also available under a variety of proprietary licenses. In addition to relational databases and SQL, an RDBMS like MySQL works with an operating system to implement a relational database in a computer's storage system, manages users, allows for network access and facilitates testing database integrity and creation of backups.

SQL is a language programmers use to create, modify and extract data from the relational database, as well as control user access to the database. A relational database organizes data into one or more data tables in which data may be related to each other these relations help structure the data. Its name is a combination of 'My', the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and 'SQL', the acronym for Structured Query Language. MySQL ( / ˌ m aɪ ˌ ɛ s ˌ k juː ˈ ɛ l/) is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS).

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