Internet search engines such as Google have popularized keyword based search. Applications in which plain text coexists with structured data are pervasive, examples of which are CRM and Knowledge Management applications among many MySQL customers. The simplicity of keyword search as a querying paradigm offers compelling values for data exploration. Specifically, keyword search does not require a priori knowledge of the database schema and its catalogs. The above is significant as much information in a corporation is increasingly being available at its intranet.

Currently, MySQL provides indexing and querying capabilities for textual attributes that incorporate information retrieval (IR) relevance ranking strategies, but this search functionality requires that queries specify the exact column or columns against which a given list of keywords is to be matched. This requirement can be cumbersome and inflexible from a user perspective: good answers to a keyword query might need to be 'assembled' 'in perhaps unforeseen ways' by joining tuples from multiple relations. Moreover, casual users, usually have little knowledge of formulating keyword queries using SQL extensions, not to mention they are - in many scenarios - more interested to discover unexpected answers that are often difficult to obtain via rigid-format SQL queries.

MySQLXplorer operates on relational databases and facilitates information discovery on them by allowing its user to issue keyword queries without any knowledge of the database schema or of SQL. In other words, MySQLXplorer is the first step toward realizing multi-column and multi-table keyword search in MySQL.