MySQL is a relational database management system written in C and C++. It works across many platforms and is designed to be fully multi-threaded to take advantage of multiple CPUs. It supports large databases with flexible security and has over a dozen data types including numeric, date/time, and string types. MySQL uses storage engines like MyISAM and InnoDB to store and retrieve data, with InnoDB being the default and most widely used as it supports transactions and row-level locking. MySQL also includes many built-in mathematical, aggregate, string, and date/time functions to manipulate data.