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
MySQL supports multiple storage engines (e.g. MyISAM, INNODB, etc) each with its pros and cons, and each table in a MySQL database can have a different storage engine selected. This post looks at how to work out which table storage engine is used by a MySQL table, using either a SQL query or using the web browser tool phpMyAdmin.
The last MySQL post looked at how to tell which storage engine a MySQL table uses by running a SQL query or using phpMyAdmin. This post looks at how to change the storage engine used by a MySQL table using either a SQL query or phpMyAdmin.
Some time back I posted how to rename a table in MySQL, either using a SQL query or using phpMyAdmin. In this post I will show how to rename multiple MySQL tables from a single query, including how you would swap two table names.
If you are getting “too many connections” errors in MySQL you can change the max_connections setting to allow more connections, assuming…
It is possible to insert multiple records into MySQL using a comma separated list of fields. This post looks at how to do this using SQL – if you're using a nice ORM solution instead of writing SQL queries then this won't really apply.
There may be instances when you need to set your MySQL database to a different timezone from the one the server is in, but only for a specific website or application. It is possible to set the timezone on a per connection basis with MySQL and this post looks at how to do it.