Chapter 1. MySQL

Anyone can relate to the gap in usefulness between piles of paper on a desktop and those same papers organized in a filing cabinet. The former is a mess. If you actually want a particular paper, you need to dig through the piles to find it. If you are lucky, you will just happen to start with the pile in which the desired paper is located. It could, however, require you to go through each piece of paper in each pile to find what you are seeking. With a filing cabinet, however, you know exactly where to look and will fumble through just a few papers to find your goal.

Relational databases have been acting as the electronic filing cabinets for the voluminous and complex data storage needs of large companies for over two decades. A relational database is simply the only tool capable of structuring most data so that it is actually usable—not just piles of bits on a hard drive. Until recently, you were simply out of luck if you wanted to build an application backed by a robust database on a small budget. Your choices were quite simple: shell out thousands—or even tens or hundreds of thousands—of dollars on Oracle or Sybase or build the application against "toy" databases such as Access and FileMakerPro. Thanks to such databases as mSQL, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, however, you now have a variety of choices that suit different needs. This book, of course, is the story of MySQL.^[1]

^[1] SQL is pronounced either "sequel" or "ess-que-ell," though the preferred form is "ess-que-ell."