MySQL Programming

Mini SQL (mSQL) is a light weight relational database management system capable of providing rapid access to your data with very little overhead. mSQL is developed by Hughes Technologies Pty Ltd.

MySQL was started from mSQL and shared the same API.

SQL, SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language), is a language for RDBMS (Relational Database Management Systems). SQL was developed by IBM Corporation.

A table is a data storage structure with rows and columns.

MySQL is an open source database management system developed by MySQL AB, http://www.mysql.com.

Rollback is a way to terminate a transaction with all database changes not saving to the database server.

A transaction is a logical unit of work requested by a user to be applied to the database objects. MySQL server introduces the transaction concept to allow users to group one or more SQL statements into a single transaction, so that the effects of all the SQL statements in a transaction can be either all committed (applied to the database) or all rolled back (undone from the database).

Commit is a way to terminate a transaction with all database changes to be saved permanently to the database server.

CSV (Comma Separated Values) is a file format used to store database table contents, where one table row is stored as one line in the file, and each data field is separated with comma.

BDB (BerkeleyDB) is transaction safe storage engine originally developed at U.C. Berkeley. It is now developed by Sleepycat Software, Inc. (an Oracle company now).

InnoDB is a transaction safe storage engine developed by Innobase Oy (an Oracle company now).

ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method) was developed by IBM to store and retrieve data on secondary storage systems like tapes.

MySQL is an open source database management system developed by MySQL AB, http://www.mysql.com. You can download a copy and install it on your local computer very easily. Here is how you can do this:

* Go to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html.

* Select the "Windows" and "Without installer" version.

* Find a mirror site and download "mysql-noinstall-5.0.24-win32.zip".

* Unzip the file, you will get a new sub-directory, ".mysql-5.0.24-win32".

* Move and rename this sub-directory to mysql.

* The installation is done and your MySQL server is ready.

MyISAM is a storage engine used as the default storage engine for MySQL database. MyISAM is based on the ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method) concept and offers fast data storage and retrieval. But it is not transaction safe.

Join is data retrieval operation that combines multiple query outputs of the same structure into a single output.

Join is data retrieval operation that combines rows from multiple tables under certain matching conditions to form a single row.

If you want to start the MySQL server, you can run the "mysqld" program in a command window as shown in the following tutorial:

>cd mysqlin

>mysqld

"mysqld" will run quietly without printing any message in you command window. So you will see nothing after entering the "mysqld" command. You should trust "mysqld" and believe that MySQL server is running ok on your local computer now.

Another way to start the MySQL server is double-click mysqlinmysqld.exe on your file explorer window.

A view is a logical table defined by a query statement.

An index is a single column or multiple columns defined to have values pre-sorted to speed up data retrieval speed.

A foreign key is a single column or multiple columns defined to have values that can be mapped to a primary key in another table.