MySQL (pronounced “My Ess Cue Ell”) is more than just “the world’s most popular open source database,” as the developers at the MySQL AB corporation (http://www.mysql.com) claim. This modest-sized database has introduced millions of everyday computer users and amateur researchers to the world of powerful information systems.
MySQL is a relatively recent entrant into the well-established area of relational database management systems (RDBMs), a concept invented by IBM researcher Edgar Frank Codd in 1970. Despite the arrival of newer types of data repositories over the past 35 years, relational databases remain the workhorses of the information world. They permit users to represent sophisticated relationships between items of data and to calculate these relationships with the speed needed to make decisions in modern organizations. It’s impressive how you can go from design to implementation in just a few hours, and how easily you can develop web applications to access terabytes of data and serve thousands of web users per second.
Whether you’re offering products on a web site, conducting a scientific survey, or simply trying to provide useful data to your classroom, bike club, or religious organization, MySQL gets you started quickly and lets you scale up your services comfortably over time. Its ease of installation and use led media analyst Clay Shirky to credit MySQL with driving a whole new type of information system he calls “situated software”—custom software that can be easily designed and built for niche applications.
In this book, we provide detailed instructions to help you set up MySQL and related software. We’ll teach you Structured Query Language (SQL), which is used to insert, retrieve, and manipulate data. We’ll also provide a tutorial on database design, explain how to configure MySQL for improved security, and offer you advanced hints on getting even more out of your data. In the last five chapters, we show how to interact with the database using the PHP and Perl programming languages, and how to allow interaction with your data over the medium most people prefer these days: the Web.
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