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MySQL Hosting for Database Driven Dynamic Web Sites

IIC Internet Services is proud to offer you unlimited MySQL Databases as part of our web site hosting packages.

Advantages of MySQL as Your Database Software of Choice

MySQL is a relational database software unmatched in speed, compactness, stability and ease of deployment. MySQL has many advantages over competitor databases, such as:

PHP has extensive built-in support for MySQL.
MySQL outperforms other databases in benchmarking tests.
MySQL is 'open source' (defined below).

What would I use MySQL for?

You can use MySQL to store customer and products databases. You can then your use PHP scripts to do interesting things with that data on your web site, such as dynamically displaying product information, updating customer details, and searching through many records for just the products of interest to a user, based on their query. Often times your databases, whether you know it or not, are (or should be) relational.

What is a Relational Database?

A relational database stores data in separate tables and can be structured with one-to-many as well as one-to-one relationships between table data. This is an important distinction from flat-file databases, which do not support one-to-many relationships.

Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server are other examples of relational database software.

Open Source

Unlike Oracle's and Microsoft's software, MySQL is 'open source,' meaning that the source code is freely available and not proprietary. Thus, developers from all over the world donate their time to help improve the MySQL software and look for bugs.

What is SQL?

Data in a MySQL database is extracted, inserted, and updated using SQL, or Structured Query Language. An example of a SQL command is:

select Phone from Customers where name = 'Smith'

PHP and MySQL - the 'dynamic duo' of Dynamic Web Site Development

In most cases you would employ PHP scripts on your web site to make SQL calls that access your MySQL database. PHP scripts don't have to be written from scratch though. A huge library of PHP scripts can be downloaded for free from HotScripts.

Administering Your MySQL Databases

One of the easiest ways to administer your MySQL databases is using free software called phpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin is a set of PHP scripts that allow you easily create, modify, and drop tables as well as execute, select, update, delete, and add queries. (Note: you should not drop or delete the database itself as you will lose all of your data.) Simply download phpMyAdmin from http://www.phpmyadmin.net, install it onto your site, define your settings in the configuration file, and password protect the subdirectory where you're going to store phpMyAdmin (using a .htaccess file), and you're off!

screenshots of the phpMyAdmin web administrative interface

More Information on MySQL

Full MySQL documentation can be accessed from http://www.mysql.com/documentation/.

Some other tutorials to check out:

WebMonkey [http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/99/21/index2a.html]
DevShed [http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/MySQL]
PHPBuilder [http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/hill20011214.php3]

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