MySQL develops all of the documentation internally. This includes the various version-specific reference manuals, the documentation for the GUI tools such as MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser, and specialized guides such as the NDB API Internals manual.

These manuals are provided in multiple formats and are accessible from the main MySQL Documentation page.

This guide provides information on the format, structure, and build processes that are used to develop and produce the documentation, and information on how you can build your own custom documentation using the publicly available Subversion repository. (Note, though, that publishing MySQL documentation is subject to the limitations stated in our legal notice.) It also contains a style guide on writing proper documentation, and a DocBook guide covering mark-up.

All of the MySQL documentation is written using the DocBook XML format. Using DocBook XML enables us to easily generate the documentation in a number of different output formats, including:

In addition to the standard DocBook XML source and transformations into these formats, we have built custom templates and translations to generate custom markup, and a number of tools and utilities that provide enhanced functionality. Note, though, that we have not modified the DocBook XML DTD. All our custom tools are written for either XSLT or Perl.