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
The MySQL command line utility allows you to run queries and view query results etc from an interactive command prompt. It is also possible to run a single query from the command line without actually going into the interactive prompt. This post looks at how to do this.
A few days ago I posted how to hide the information schema in phpMyAdmin and of course using the advice in that post you can hide any database you want. The hide_db phpMyAdmin configuration option is a regular expression so you can use it to hide several databases, and this post looks at how to do this.
When you log into phpMyAdmin you can only see the databases for which you have access rights, as well as the information_schema database. It is possible to hide this database if you want to. This post looks at how to hide the information_schema database in phpMyAdmin.
Like other database management systems, MySQL has a range of date functions which allow you to change the formatting of dates, get day/week/month/etc parts of dates, and add or subtract intervals to a specified date. This post looks at how to add intervals to a date in MySQL.
In previous posts I looked at how to optimize a MySQL table from the MySQL command line interface and from phpMyAdmin by using the optimize [tablename] command to free up unused space. In this post I will look at how to do this with a PHP script which could be run periodically to optimise all non-optimal MySQL tables.
Yesterday I looked at how to Optimize a table in MySQL from the command line interface and today will look at how to do the same thing with phpMyAdmin. This means you can just point and click in a web based interface instead of having to remember the commands and type them in.