One of the main strengths of PHP is its support for a vast number of databases. Very often, PHP and MySQL are viewed as an entity. However, other databases have their strengths, toofor instance, it took MySQL a very long time to support features that are considered standard in other systems; however, MySQL is known to be very fast. This chapter tackles quite a number of databases and shows the basic operations with them: connecting, sending SQL statements, and evaluating the return values. No matter what your database-driven web application must do, it always has to do these steps. To have some test data, we created a database called phrasebook in the relational database management system (RDBMS) and put a table called quotes in there. This table consists of four fields:
Every database system comes with either management tools or third-party products available. For instance, the PHP-based phpMyAdmin (http://www.phpmyadmin.net/) shown in Figure 7.1 offers very good access to a MySQL installation. Figure 7.1. Managing a MySQL installation using phpMyAdmin. |