Fast Company’s cover story this month is about Facebook creator and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Obviously, there’s a lot to cover here. I thought reporter Ellen McGirt did a great job covering the rise of Facebook and the reasoning behind Zuckerberg’s decision to keep the company private rather than selling or going public.
The part of the article that stood out for me is when COO Owen Van Natta discussed Facebook’s backend:
“We’re one of the largest MySQL Web sites in production,” says chief operating officer Owen Van Natta, 37. MySQL, a popular open-source software, “has been a revolution for young entrepreneurs,” Van Natta explains, partly because it frees them from paying the licensing fees of, say, an Oracle.
The role of MySQL in the emergence of new Web technologies from WordPress to Facebook has been huge. It’s a free, open source database system that has become an integral part of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python).
As boring as they sound, databases are the driving force behind everything that has been happening online. All of the robust content management that has enabled free expression, word of mouth and consumer generated media is due to MySQL and other structured query database programs like it. This blog runs on a MySQL database. So do all the blogs at Wordpress.com.
Blogging platform Movable Type runs on MySQL, although it also works with Microsoft’s SQL Server. But as Van Natta pointed out, MySQL continues to be the dominant force in online entrepreneurship and open source development simply because it is both robust and free.
Companies can expect that as more of these types of technologies become widespread, you’ll see more opportunities for your customers to express themselves in new and powerful ways. After all, when you give smart people robust, inexpensive tools, they’ll create things that people will want to use.
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Daniel K 04.16.07 at 8:05 pm
Teresa, I know you’ve been working with MediaWiki, and that of course also runs on MySQL.
MySQL lagged the big databases, and at an enterprise level is still not seriously considered by most companies, but it is coming along, and if you don’t need a lot of the high end features (that the Oracles and SQLServers will have you believe you cannot live without) then MySQL has its place.
As an enabling technology, there is a good reason we don’t call it LAOP or LASP!