Last Updated on May 24, 2022
Oracle is a computer technology corporation best known for its software products and services like Java.
In 2020, Oracle was the second-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. They employ over 130,000 people, and sell cloud-engineering services and systems and database management systems.
Oracle has a fairly prominent position with open source. They are a supporting member of the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and the Java Community Process.
Through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle also became the steward of many other important and long-running open source projects such as the Java programming language and the MySQL relational database, introduced in 1995. The acquisition of Sleepycat Software, brought the open source Berkeley DB key/value store.
The company co-develops the OpenJDK, an open source implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition, and Btrfs, a B-tree file system. They also open source the Oracle Coherence Community Edition, NetBeans, and produce Oracle Linux which is a Linux distro compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code.
While Oracle develops and distributes open source software, they have many different business models. The majority of their products are published under a proprietary license. This series looks at free and open source alternatives to Oracle’s products.
MySQL is a database management system. It runs as a server and allows multiple users to manage and create numerous databases. It is a central component in the LAMP stack of open source web application software that is used to create websites.
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.
What are the best free and open source alternatives to MySQL?
1. MariaDB Server
MariaDB Server is one of the most popular database servers in the world. It’s made by the original developers of MySQL and guaranteed to stay open source.
MariaDB seeks high compatibility with MySQL, ensuring a drop-in replacement capability with library binary parity and exact matching with MySQL APIs and commands. It includes storage engines including Aria, a crash safe alternative to MyISAM.
There are millions of installations of MariaDB worldwide, and thousands of downloads a day of MariaDB installation software.
2. PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) based on POSTGRES, Version 4.2, developed at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department.
It has more than 30 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It is the most feature-rich robust open-source database.
3. SQLite
SQLite is the most widely deployed SQL database engine in the world. This software is an almost ACID-compliant embedded relational database management system contained in a relatively small C programming library. ACID Consistency means that only valid data can be written to the database.
We also cover other good free and open source relational databases.
All articles in this series:
| Alternatives to Oracle's Products | |
|---|---|
 | Business Intelligence is business analytics software that offers an integrated, end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System. |
 | Business Process Management is a complete set of tools for creating, executing, and optimizing business processes. |
 | Database is a multi-model database management system often used for running online transaction processing, data warehousing and mixed database workloads. |
 | JDeveloper covers the full development lifecycle from design through coding, debugging, optimization and profiling to deploying. |
 | OC4J (Oracle Containers for J2EE) is a slimmed down version of Oracle Application Server. |
| MySQL is a relational database management system. It runs as a server and allows multiple users to manage and create numerous databases. |
 | Siebel CRM delivers a combination of transactional, analytical, and engagement features to manage all customer-facing operations. |
 | TopLink is a mapping and persistence framework for Java developers. It is an object-persistence and object-transformation framework. |
| Web Cache is a secure reverse proxy cache and a compression engine deployed between a browser and web server/content management server. |
I am surprised you did not include Percona’s distribution of MySQL. It is free and has many of the ‘enterprise’ features added to it that cost extra with Oracle’s version.
Article author omitted Firebird, an Open Source SQL RDBMS that has been established for very many years
The purpose of the article is to select the best alternatives to MySQL, not to recommend each and every open source relational database available, and there are many good ones available. Open source is certainly very strong in this field. A distribution of MySQL is not really an alternative in our opinion.
For this series we keep our selections to a limited number on purpose. This also applies to our series recommending free and open source alternatives to products developed by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Autodesk, Atlassian, Corel etc.
And no, we didn’t forget about Firebird. It’s included in our Relational Database roundup. You’ve indirectly made a good suggestion though, we will update the articles in each series to add a link to a relevant roundup so that readers are offered a wider choice.