Preface

MySQL is the most popular open source database system available. Although it's free, it's still very dependable and fast, and is being employed increasingly in areas that used to be the province of Oracle or MS SQL Server. Thanks to a variety of utilities packaged with MySQL, administration is fairly effortless. And with its several application programming interfaces (APIs), it's easy to develop your own software to interface with MySQL.

This book provides a quick reference to MySQL statements and functions, the administrative utilities, and the most popular APIs. The first few chapters are designed to help you get started with MySQL. Each chapter on an API also starts with a tutorial.

When this book was written, Version 4.1 of MySQL was released, and early releases of the development Version of 5.0 were available but not yet stable. As a result, you will find mostly features from Version 4.x, along with some from Version 5.x, in this book. Features that appear only in newer versions are noted as such.