Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
MySQL (pronounced “My Ess Cue Ell”) is more than just “the world's most popular
open source database,” as the developers at the MySQL AB corporation (
http://www
.mysql.com
)
claim. This modest-sized database has introduced millions of everyday
computer users and amateur researchers to the world of powerful information systems.
MySQL is a relatively recent entrant into the well-established area of
relational database
management systems
(RDBMs), a concept invented by IBM researcher Edgar Frank
Codd in 1970. Despite the arrival of newer types of data repositories over the past 35
years, relational databases remain the workhorses of the information world. They per-
mit users to represent sophisticated relationships between items of data and to calculate
these relationships with the speed needed to make decisions in modern organizations.
It's impressive how you can go from design to implementation in just a few hours, and
how easily you can develop web applications to access terabytes of data and serve
thousands of web users per second.
Whether you're offering products on a web site, conducting a scientific survey, or sim-
ply trying to provide useful data to your classroom, bike club, or religious organization,
MySQL gets you started quickly and lets you scale up your services comfortably over
time. Its ease of installation and use led media analyst Clay Shirky to credit MySQL
with driving a whole new type of information system he calls “situated software”—
custom software that can be easily designed and built for niche applications.
In this topic, we provide detailed instructions to help you set up MySQL and related
software. We'll teach you Structured Query Language (SQL), which is used to insert,
retrieve, and manipulate data. We'll also provide a tutorial on database design, explain
how to configure MySQL for improved security, and offer you advanced hints on get-
ting even more out of your data. In the last five chapters, we show how to interact with
the database using the PHP and Perl programming languages, and how to allow inter-
action with your data over the medium most people prefer these days: the Web.
