Understanding MySQL Internals

MySQL history goes back to 1979 when Monty Widenius, working for a small company called TcX, created a reporting tool written in BASIC that ran on a 4 Mhz computer with 16 KB RAM. Over time, the tool was rewritten in C and ported to run on Unix. It was still just a low-level storage engine with a reporting front end. The tool was known by the name of Unireg.

Working under the adverse conditions of little computational resources, and perhaps building on his God-given talent, Monty developed a habit and ability to write very efficient code naturally. He also developed, or perhaps was gifted from the start, with an unusually acute vision of what needed to be done to the code to make it useful in future development—without knowing in advance much detail about what that future development would be.

In addition to the above, with TcX being a very small company and Monty being one of the owners, he had a lot of say in what happened to his code. While there are perhaps a good number of programmers out there with Monty’s talent and ability, for a number of reasons, few get to carry their code around for more than 20 years. Monty did.

Monty’s work, talents, and ownership of the code provided a foundation upon which the Miracle of MySQL could be built.

Some time in the 1990s, TcX customers began to push for an SQL interface ...