Many popular commercial databases, such as Oracle and MS SQL, are available at greatly reduced cost or even free to developers and/or students. In other cases, the parent company offers an open source version similar to its enterprise counterparts.

This leads me to my personal opinion on which relational database (DBMS) is best. Also, that's MySQL. To be honest, I'm far from alone in thinking this way. MySQL has been at the top of the list of most popular database platforms for many years. Here are the top 5 databases (commercial and free) and their market share percentages in 2019:

MySQL: 52%
PostgreSQL: 36%
Microsoft SQL Server: 34%
SQLite: 30%
MongoDB: 26%
So why is MySQL so popular?

Sure, it's free (at least the Community Edition is), but there's more to it than just the price. Another attractive feature is that MySQL is open source software. This allows it to be customized or modified according to the user's needs. Also, since no licensing fees are required, many third-party tools and interfaces have been developed for MySQL.

Since its founding by a Swedish company in the mid-90s, MySQL has been acquired by larger companies: Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL in 2008. Then Oracle bought it in 2010. Each time, there's been a lot of speculation that MySQL's free status will change soon. However, this is not the case.

MySQL is also very versatile. It's portable enough for development use, yet powerful enough for most mission-critical applications. In fact, many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations, including Facebook, Google, Adobe, Alcatel Lucent, and Zappos, rely on MySQL to save time and money supporting their high-volume websites, business-critical systems, and packaged software.

It has been suggested that the rise of small startups or individually developed web applications contributed to MySQL's popularity in a number of ways. Again, price aside, the fact that MySQL uses basic SQL and is easy to set up and configure makes it a choice for powering many web applications.

Another great feature of MySQL is the large online support community that supports it. Freelance developers from around the world are constantly adding to the functionality and usefulness of the database platform. Oracle also offers paid support, but it is not mandatory.

The massive popularity of MySQL has prompted sql database free many 3rd party vendors to create software to use it. These include development and management clients like Navicat for MySQL and monitoring tools like Navicat Monitor. While neither tool is free, they make a living by providing an all-encompassing front end with an intuitive and powerful graphical interface for database administration, development, and maintenance. Powerful and easy to use, these tools save developers and administrators time and effort in everything they do.

Navicat products are available for Windows, macOS and Linux.