Data, in all varieties, continues to be the cornerstone from which modern organizations
and businesses derive their information capital. Whether putting items in an online shopping
cart for checkout or tracking terabytes of purchase history to find shopping trends, having a
database to store and retrieve data has become a necessity. From the individual to the small
nonprofit organization, the small business to the large corporation, retrieving stored information
at the right time and in the right format is helping people make more informed business
decisions. The demand for larger amounts of data, stored in more user-friendly formats and
using faster database tools, continues to grow.

While the demand for tools to store, retrieve, and mine data has grown, MySQL AB has
been hard at work building the database to handle these ever-increasing needs. When initially
released, MySQL focused on speed and simplicity, intentionally sacrificing some of the more
advanced features of proprietary relational database management systems for better performance.
For many years, MySQL focused on performance and stability, but as it rose in the market,
the database fell under criticism for its lack of advanced features, including things like foreign
keys, row-level locking, stored procedures, views, triggers, and clustering.