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
Dates and times are stored in MySQL in the format "YYYY-MM-DD" and "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS" which is not necessarily the format you want to display in your web page or application. There are two methods to reformat the date and time into the desired format.
The article covers the errors that can occur when using mysqlimport to import data into the popular open-source MySQL database server.
phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL using a web browser and is one of the most active projects on Sourceforge.
It is possible to log all queries done by the MySQL server. To enable MySQL logging, the MySQL manual indicates you should add –log[=file_name] when starting mysqld. This isn't really the best options, as most Linux distributions use init scripts to start up MySQL, and this means either modifying them, or calling mysqld from the command line, which isn't really the best way of doing this when the init scripts do the job of starting and stopping services so nicely. So instead, it is easier to modify the my.cnf file (located at /etc/my.cnf on many Linux distros) and add the logging option there.
I run a number of web servers with PHP and MySQL and have a PHP command line script that runs on a daily basis to back up MySQL databases using the mysqldump command. It would be possible to do this using a simple bash script as well, and I know I used to use a bash script in the past but for some reason switched it to PHP at some stage.
mysqldump is a command line tool for outputting table structures and data and can be used for backups etc. By default mysqldump will dump all data from a table, but it is possible to select which data to be exported with mysqldump. This post looks at how to do this.