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 client allows you to quickly and easily run sql queries from a console session, as well as load sql script files etc. Once you have started up the MySQL command line client it is possible to execute shell commands from within the console and even drop out to another bash (or similar) session. This post looks at how to do this.
Using MySQL version 4.0 or higher you can update a table by joining two or more tables together; this allows one table to be updated based on fields in associated records in another table.
The MySQL Control Center (also known as MySQLCC) is a platform-independent GUI administration client for the MySQL database server.
MySQL has a useful command line tool which can be used to query and manage databases and users. This command is simply "mysql" and will usually be in the command path on Linux and BSD distributions, although to use it on Windows you would normally first need to change to the directory/folder that the MySQL binary applications are before running "mysql". This post gives a brief overview of logging in and a couple of commands for listing and changing databases, and running queries
There are a number of string functions in MySQL for extracting text, working out the position of a substring, calulating the length of text and so on. This post looks at how to work out the length of the longest string in a field in a MySQL table.
The MySQL command line tool allows you to run queries and administer databases from the command line. In previous posts I have looked at the basics of using the MySQL command line tool and executing shell commands. In this post I will look at running queries and the output from these.