MySQL: A Basic Introduction of MySQL

MySQL is one of the most open-source de-facto standard database system. A database system is consists of several objects. MySQL can be used with PHP and If you want to understand the basic introduction of MySQL, you need a basic overview of MySQL. In this page you will learn about the basic of MySQL, database, tables, rows, records, coloumns, queries etc. To learn all of these, just keep reading...

MySQL

• MySQL is the most popular open-source database system.
• In MySQL, data is stored in database objects ( These objects are often referred as tables.
• MySQL is the de-facto standard database for web sites that support huge volumes of both data and end users (like Friendster, Yahoo, Google).

Tables

All the objects of MySQL is known as tables. Tables contains several records. Without the table, the database can't be formed. So, it's the base of any database.

Database

A database contains one or more tables. Actually, a database is a collection of objects and this objects are referred as tables. So, you can say that a database is a collection of related tables. For example, School database consists of the tables of "Students", "departments".

In summary, a database table is:

• identified by a name
• contain records (rows) with data

Records

The table contains several records. Record refers each row of the table. A table is formed by several records. If there is no record of a table then the table is referred as empty table.

Collumns or attributes

Each record is formed by several fields. This field has some value. By the combination of several fields a record is formed. If any column value of any record is empty, that is called that field has null value or empty value.

Queries

Queries play an improtant thing. By applying several queries, specific information and recordset is retrived from the database. In short, the queires may look like the followings:

• a question or a request
• With MySQL, we can query a database for specific information and have a recordset returned
• Example: SELECT LastName FROM Students;

Example:

One database of a university may have one table Students which contains the basic information i.e. students FirstName, LastName, Country and Age of the students. The table may look like the following:

Students
------------------------------------------------------------------
|    FirstName     |   LastName    |    Country   |      Age     |

------------------------------------------------------------------
|    John          |   Adams       |    USA       |      20      |
|    Dollie        |   Jacob       |    Canada    |      18      |
|    Christopher   |   Aleanic     |    Turkey    |      18      |
|    Ferrci        |   Little      |    Germany   |      19      |
------------------------------------------------------------------

By analyzing the above table, we can say that the table has the following characteristics:

The name of the table is Students. It's a database object. It has several records which are the rows of the table. According to the table Students, it has four rows or records. Each row contains four column field.

You can generate any query from the above table. For example, if you want to find out LastName o Students table, then the query may look like the following:

select LastName

from Students;

Download MySQL Database

MySQL is totally free. To download MySQL, please follow the following link:

http://www.mysql.com/downloads/index.html [http://www.mysql.com/downloads/index.html]

This is all about the introduction of MySQL. This page provides you short information of MySQL, Tables, Database, Records, Attributes, Queries. At last, one example is provided to understand you the whole thing.

Next, I will write about the connection database opening and closing of MySQL to use with php.