Administration and Beyond - Learning MySQL and MariaDB - page 297

Part V. Administration and Beyond
In this final part, we will cover some administrative activities of MySQL and MariaDB.
These are activities that are not necessarily related to the development of databases, but are
still related to the management of data. Some of these are routine activities and some are
only occasionally performed. And we'll cover some aspects that go beyond MySQL and
MariaDB.
First, in Chapter13 , we'll cover the management of user accounts and their privileges. We
covered this briefly at the start of this topic, but in this chapter we will discuss it in more
depth. We'll go through how to be more precise about which privileges are given to each
user and for which databases and tables.
In Chapter14 , we'll discuss how to make backups of databases. This is a very important
administrative duty. Related to that, we will cover the less routine administrative activity of
restoring a backup. When this is needed, it's usually critical and urgent. You're always en-
couraged to complete the exercises at the end of each chapter, but because this chapter cov-
ers such an important topic, the exercises here are particularly essential.
Chapter15 explains the administrative task of importing large amounts of data. The bulk
importing of data from another database or from another format (e.g., from a spreadsheet or
a text file containing comma-separated values) may not be something you will do often.
However, knowing how to do it when needed can be very useful and save you plenty of
time and frustration.
The topic concludes with Chapter16 , which briefly covers a few APIs. These include ex-
amples for connecting and querying MySQL and MariaDB with PHP and a few other pro-
gramming languages. Almost all databases are interfaced with an API, as it allows for
greater control and security−and doesn't require users to know anything about using a data-
base.