30 Years of MySQL (Guest on Urlaub im Userspace Podcast)

I joined the Urlaub im Userspace podcast to celebrate 30 years of MySQL and to talk about why it’s still one of the most relevant databases today. We didn’t just look back at the 90s and our first MySQL projects (and my early adventures in premature optimization) but also dove deep into what makes MySQL powerful today: ACID, transactions, foreign keys, clustering, scaling challenges, and how companies like Facebook scale massive MySQL setups.

I shared how I modeled hierarchies in databases without using recursions in the 90s thanks to Kristian Köhntopp for his blog post about it. We also answered community questions like “Why do we write SQL keywords in ALL CAPS?” and, of course, debated “Should logic live inside the database or not?” (spoiler: I love CREATE EVENT, Enrico doesn’t). And yes, we even talked about why we still prefer MySQL over PostgreSQL for many use cases plus the eternal topic of German vs. Austrian: “Es lebe der Beistrich!”

Big thanks to Enrico Bartz and Christian Stankowic for hosting and for such a fun and nerdy conversation about databases that are anything but old news.

Listen to the episode here.