With well over 10 million installations, MySQL is probably the most popular database management system for web servers. Developed in the mid-1990s, it’s now a mature technology that powers many of today’s most-visited Internet destinations.One reason for its success must be the fact that, like PHP, it’s free to use. But it’s also extremely powerful and exceptionally fast—it can run on even the most basic of hardware,and it hardly puts a dent in system resources.
Storing Info with MySQL
MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Essentially, this means that MySQL allows users to store information in a table-based structure, using rows and columns to organize different pieces of data. There are many other relational database management systems. The examples in this book rely on MySQL to store the information you’ll use in your PHP scripts, from blog entries to administrator information. This approach has great
advantages, which we will explore in detail.
