The MySQL development project has made its source code available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements. MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now owned by Sun Microsystems, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation.

Members of the MySQL community have created several forks such as Drizzle, OurDelta, Percona Server, and MariaDB. All of these forks were in progress before the Oracle acquisition (Drizzle was announced 8 months before the Sun acquisition).

Free-software projects that require a full-featured database management system often use MySQL. Such projects include (for example) WordPress, phpBB, Drupal and other software built on the LAMP software stack. MySQL is also used in many high-profile, large-scale World Wide Web products including Wikipedia, Google and Facebook.

The "M" in the acronym of the popular LAMP software stack refers to MySQL. Its popularity for use with web applications is closely tied to the popularity of PHP (the "P" in LAMP). Several of the highest-traffic web sites (including Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Google (though not for searches), Nokia and YouTube) use MySQL for data storage and logging of user data.

MySQL code uses C and C++. The SQL parser uses yacc and a home-brewed lexer, sql_lex.cc

MySQL works on many different system platforms, including AIX, BSDi, FreeBSD, HP-UX, i5/OS, Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Novell NetWare, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, eComStation, OS/2 Warp, QNX, IRIX, Solaris, Symbian, SunOS, SCO OpenServer, SCO UnixWare, Sanos, Tru64 and Microsoft Windows. A port of MySQL to OpenVMS also exists.

Many programming languages with language-specific APIs include libraries for accessing MySQL databases[examples needed]. In addition, an ODBC interface called MyODBC allows additional programming languages that support the ODBC interface to communicate with a MySQL database, such as ASP or ColdFusion. The HTSQL - URL based query method also ships with MySQL adapter allowing direct interaction with MySQL database from any web client via structured URLs. The MySQL server and official libraries are mostly implemented in ANSI C/ANSI C++.

MySQL is primarily an RDBMS and therefore ships with no GUI tools to administer MySQL databases or manage data contained within. Users may use the included command-line tools, or download MySQL frontends from various parties that have developed desktop software and web applications to manage MySQL databases, build database structure, and work with data records.

The official MySQL Workbench is a free integrated environment developed by MySQL AB, that enables users to graphically administer MySQL databases and visually design database structure. MySQL Workbench replaces the previous package of software, MySQL GUI Tools. Similar to other third-party packages but still considered the authoritative MySQL frontend, MySQL Workbench lets users manage the following:

MySQL Workbench is available in two editions, the regular free and open source Community Edition which may be downloaded from the MySQL website, and the proprietary Standard Edition which extends and improves the feature set of the Community Edition.