Whether you are a developer or an enterprise, you would obviously choose one that provides good benefits and results when compared to other related products. MySQL provides numerous advantages as the first choice in this competitive market. It has various powerful features available that make it a more comprehensive database. Let's now go through some benefits of using MySQL.

The first thing that comes to mind is securing data because nowadays data has become precious and can impact business continuity if legal obligations are not met; in fact, it can be so bad that it can close down your business in no time. MySQL is the most secure and reliable database management system used by many well-known enterprises such as Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia. It really provides a good security layer that protects sensitive information from intruders. MySQL gives access control management so that granting and revoking required access from the user is easy. Roles can also be defined with a list of permissions that can be granted or revoked for the user. All user passwords are stored in an encrypted format using plugin-specific algorithms.

Day by day, the mountain of data is growing because of extensive use of technology in numerous ways. Because of this, load average is going through the roof. In some cases, it is unpredictable that data cannot exceed up to some limit or number of users will not go out of bounds. Scalable databases would be a preferable solution so that, at any point, we can meet unexpected demands to scale. MySQL is a rewarding database system for its scalability, which can scale horizontally and vertically; in terms of data, spreading database and load of application queries across multiple MySQL servers is quite feasible. It is pretty easy to add horsepower to the MySQL cluster to handle the load.

MySQL is an open source database management system that makes debugging, upgrading, and enhancing the functionality fast and easy. You can view the source and make the changes accordingly and use it in your own way. You can also distribute an extended version of MySQL, but you will need to have a license for this.

MySQL gives high-speed transaction processing with optimal speed. It can cache the results, which boosts read performance. Replication and clustering make the system scalable for more concurrency and manages the heavy workload. Database indexes also accelerate the performance of SELECT query statements for substantial amount of data. To enhance performance, MySQL 8 has included indexes in performance schema to speed up data retrieval.

Today, in the world of competitive marketing, an organization's key point is to have their system up and running. Any failure or downtime directly impacts business and revenue; hence, high availability is a factor that cannot be overlooked. MySQL is quite reliable and has constant availability using cluster and replication configurations. Cluster servers instantly handle failures and manage the failover part to keep your system available almost all the time. If one server gets down, it will redirect the user's request to another node and perform the requested operation.

MySQL provides cross-platform flexibility that can run on various platforms such as Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS2, and so on. It has great API support for the all major languages, which makes it very easy to integrate with languages such as PHP, C++, Perl, Python, Java, and so on. It is also part of the Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) server that is used worldwide for web applications.

It's now time to get our hands dirty and look at MySQL 8; let's start with the installation of MySQL 8 on a Linux platform in our case. We prefer MySQL 8 on a Linux operating system as that has been a common use case across many organizations. We will be discussing more installation in Chapter 2, Installing and Upgrading MySQL 8. You can use it on other platforms that MySQL supports, such as Windows, Solaris, HP-UNIX, and so on. Linux provides various ways to install the MySQL server, as follows:

• RPM package
• YUM repository
• APT repository
• SLES repository
• Debian package
• TAR package
• Compiling and installing from the source code