Editing Portal:Databases (section)

=== MySQL and the web application era ===

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Perl and '''MySQL''' became a common combination for web development. Perl powered CGI scripts, mod_perl applications, e-commerce systems, bulletin boards, content systems, internal tools, and early dynamic websites. MySQL provided a free, fast, easy-to-deploy relational database server.

The standard Perl DBI driver for MySQL is `DBD::mysql`, which is described as the Perl5 DBI driver for the MySQL database and an interface between Perl and the MySQL programming API.<ref>MetaCPAN, “DBD::mysql,” https://metacpan.org/pod/DBD%3A%3Amysql, accessed July 3, 2026.</ref>

This Perl/MySQL pairing helped define the early open-source web stack. Before “LAMP” became a familiar term, Perl was often one of the “P” languages in Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python. Perl was used to take form input, validate records, query MySQL, generate HTML, send mail, manage users, and produce reports. Many organizations built large internal systems this way, and a surprising amount of that code still exists.