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
It’s probably more common for people to edit MySQL tables using a more visual tool such as phpMyAdmin but it is possible to use a manually written SQL query instead to modify tables (this is what a tool like phpMyAdmin does in the background). This post shows how to drop a column from a MySQL table with a SQL query.
The MySQL command line tool mysqldump is used to create backup copies (or dumps) of databases including the structure or schema and the data itself. There are a number of command line flags which can get MySQL to dump just the data or just the structure instead of everything. This post looks at how to dump just the schema of the MySQL database as a whole, for a single table, or for several tables.
I’ve previously posted how to get the indexes for a MySQL table using a "SHOW INDEXES" SQL query and in this post show an alternative way to get the indexes for a table using MySQL’s INFORMATION_SCHEMA.
This post shows how to get some MySQL status information from the command line on a Linux/Unix machine using either the mysqladmin command or the mysql init script. Information returned includes the version, connection type, socket file location, uptime and some other stats.
MySQL’s CONVERT_TZ function converts datetime values from one timezone to another. If the timezones haven’t been set up in the MySQL database then the value returned from the function will be null. This post shows how to fix the problem.
Last week I looked at how to drop a table with MySQL showing how to do this with a query and then using the phpMyAdmin web based interface. This time I will show how to drop multiple tables with a single query and then how to do the same with phpMyAdmin.