The Story of MySQL

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December 2009. A programmer in Finland writes an open letter to the entire internet. He isn’t asking for money. He’s asking thousands of strangers to write to the European Union and help him stop a billionaire from taking the software he built — the one he named after his daughter. He spent twenty-seven years on it. And he’s about to lose it.

That software is MySQL. There’s a good chance it’s quietly running the website you’re on right now, along with a huge slice of the internet. The billionaire is Larry Ellison, and his company, Oracle, has every reason on earth to want MySQL dead.

What happened next is one of the strangest stories in tech — a slow-motion fight over whether the new owner was keeping MySQL alive or quietly killing it. Fifteen years later, people still can’t agree on which.

So what actually happened? This is the story of MySQL.

00:00 The Database That Built the Web
01:39 The Daughter Behind MySQL
03:10 How MySQL Took Over the Web
05:21 Sponsor
06:13 Oracle Takes Control
08:28 MariaDB and the Escape Plan
10:42 What Really Killed MySQL?