MySQL has been the go to database since the start of my career. This was mainly because when I started out I programmed on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack, therefore MySQL was obviously an important part of that. Over the years I have become well versed in MySQL and SQL in general, having developed hundreds of applications and sites on it. I still regularly use MySQL nowadays, as well as its sister DBs like Percona, MariaDB and lately the Amazon AWS version Aurora.

I always consider which Database engine and methodology to use for each project, but MySQL often meets all my requirements. MySQL makes an ideal solution due to its large community and a wide range of libraries, drivers and Object Data Mapper (ODM) in most programming languages.