MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database, recognized for its speed and reliability, and is frequently used with PHP to create websites. The Electric Toolbox website uses MySQL as its database backend, and I have personally been using MySQL since 1999. In that time it has proven itself to me to be an extremely fast and reliable database management system, although the earlier versions lacked some features found in other database systems, such as stored procedures, triggers, sub selects and joined table updates. Most of these are available from the 4.1 and 5.0 releases.
If you are looking for MySQL databases – for example geographical databases, I suggest you take a look at SQL Dumpster
With SQL queries you can combine the “GROUP BY” syntax with “HAVING” to return rows that match a certain count etc. This post looks at how to return rows based on a count using having specifically tested on MySQL but it should work for other database servers as well. An example table might be an …
MySQL is often configured to be accessible from the local host only. Recently I moved all my websites from a CentOS box to a Debian one and needed to be able to connect to the MySQL server on the new box from the old one, but was not able to. This post looks at how to enable MySQL to be accessible from remote servers.
There are times when you might need to randomly order a MySQL resultset, for example when choosing some winners at random for a prize draw. This post looks at how you would do this and also offers some advice if you need to "randomly" order data across multiple pages.
MySQL has a number of string handling functions including functions to concatenate text or database columns into a single column in the resultset. I’m always forgettingthat the function is CONCAT and not CONCATENATE so maybe by writing about it I will actually remember…
14 months ago I posted how to restore data from a tab delimited file to MySQL using the command line tool mysqlimport. When it came to importing multiple files at once I suggested using a for loop but have realised there’s a much simpler way to do this using wildcards or mutiple filenames.
On Wednesday I wrote a post about how to copy a table in MySQL using the SHOW CREATE TABLE sql query. Since then Paul Williams in the UK emailed me to let me know that there’s a much easier way to do this using CREATE TABLE LIKE, a function which was depths of my brain somewhere but I’d since forgotten. This post revises and republishes my previous post using this simpler process.