MySQL

Open Source

The world's most popular open-source relational database, now supercharged with native vector search and real-time analytics.

Capabilities: Relational Data Management Vector Search for AI Applications JSON Document Storage High-Concurrency Transaction Processing Real-time Analytical Processing

Visit Website

9.5

Protocol Reliability Score

Overview

MySQL continues to dominate the RDBMS landscape in 2026, evolving from a standard web-app backend into a sophisticated multi-model data platform. Under Oracle’s stewardship, it maintains its core GPL open-source offering while pushing enterprise boundaries through MySQL HeatWave—an integrated, high-performance, in-memory query accelerator. The 2026 architecture focuses heavily on Generative AI readiness, incorporating native Vector Data Types and Distance Functions directly into the InnoDB engine, allowing developers to store and query high-dimensional embeddings alongside relational data without third-party extensions. Its technical architecture remains rooted in the pluggable storage engine model, with InnoDB providing full ACID compliance, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), and robust crash recovery. MySQL's market position is cemented by its ubiquity in the LAMP/LEMP stacks, while its cloud-native variants on AWS RDS, Google Cloud SQL, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offer automated scaling and zero-ETL integrations. For 2026, it remains the primary choice for transactional workloads (OLTP) and has successfully encroached on analytical (OLAP) territory via its massively parallel processing (MPP) capabilities in HeatWave, making it a unified solution for hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP).