Data

MySQL Development

The default until something specific says otherwise.

Discuss your project Official documentation

MySQL is a relational database that handles the transactional workloads behind most business applications. Its value here is operational rather than exotic: replication, backup, monitoring and failover are well trodden, and the failure modes are documented by decades of production use.

Used properly it enforces correctness rather than merely storing data. Foreign keys, unique constraints and transactions prevent invalid states at the point of writing, which is the only place that can be guaranteed.

Why we use it

We default to a relational database because most business data is relational, and because constraints belong in the database rather than only in application code — application code changes, and there is usually more than one path that writes.

Where MySQL is not the answer we use something else: document stores for genuinely schemaless data, a dedicated search engine for full-text relevance, and time-series or analytical databases for those workloads. What we avoid is choosing a specialised store first and then discovering the data was relational after all.