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
Last week I looked at how to copy a table with MySQL using some SQL queries and then on Sunday a PHP script to automate the process. This post looks at how to copy a table with phpMyAdmin so you can easily do the same thing using a webpage GUI.
Yesterday I looked at how to copy a table with MySQL using some SQL queries. This post looks at how to automate the process with a PHP script saving you having to type in and adjust queries each time you want to back up a table.
Sometimes you might need to quickly and easily create a backup copy of a table in MySQL before doing some work to the existing table. That way you can easily copy the data back from the backup table into the original table if something goes wrong. This post looks at how to create a copy of a table in MySQL and then copy the data from the original table into the copy.
MySQL supports 4 TEXT field types (TINYTEXT, TEXT, MEDIUMTEXT and LONGTEXT) and this post looks at the maximum length of each of these field types.
I recently needed to compare the content of two columns in a MySQL database that stored the large and small images for a blog post. All the small ones start with "small" followed by a number and the large ones "big" followed by a number. Enter the REPLACE() function to get rid of small/large and do the comparison! In this postI show how to use the replace function in MySQL.
There may be times you need to check if there are records in one table that are not in another for example to check for data integrity or simply to find out if e.g. there are any products not assigned to a category or webpages to a tag. This post looks at how to do this with MySQL.