MySQL is a databasesystem used by many websites on the Internet. It is based on SQL. Many ways of doing things in SQL are similar in MySQL. The data is structured in tables in MySQL. To extract data from the tables, queries are used.
For example:
SELECT id_number
FROM main_database
WHERE name='John'
This query will return the 'id_number' of the person named 'John' from the table named 'main_database'.
History
MySQL was first released in May 1995 and a Windows version was released in January 1998. The latest version (5.6.11) was released in April 2013.