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 databases can be replicated using master-slave replication and also with master-master replication. There are plenty of tutorials online showing how to do master-slave but not many showing master-master replication and the most popular one I found was a little hard to follow. Therefore I’ve written this post to show how to do master-master replication with MySQL.
MySQL’s main configuration file is my.cnf and it is located in different locations depending on the operating system, distribution and version. This post shows how to find out where MySQL will look for the config file.
It's possible to order data randomly with MySQL using ORDER BY RAND() or doing a count on the table and then using LIMIT to choose a random offset. However neither of these are suitable for dealing with large tables with many rows. In this post I present an alternative to these but it does require modifications to the table and additional business logic and is still not perfect.
I recently showed how to load data into MySQL with foreign key constraint issues when loading a backup from tab delimited text files. This post provides a BASH command line script to generate the SQL to load all the files to save some time.
There may be times when a specific order is required in a SQL query which cannot be done using either ASC or DESC or using a special sort field. MySQL has a ORDER BY FIELD function which can be used to do this.
This post shows how to fetch data from a MySQL database using PHP’s PDO library with bound placeholders. This is a fairly basic tutorial and the functions used in it will be used in a post tomorrow titled "Load JSON data with jQuery, PHP and MySQL".