Learning MySQL and MariaDB

Chapter 16. Application Programming Interfaces

An API allows a programming language to interface easily with a computer software system. The advantage of an API is that you can customize user interfaces to MySQL and MariaDB to suit your needs. Huge websites use APIs to allow the public to interact with their MySQL and MariaDB databases, without the user needing to know anything about the databases they’re using or SQL statements.

This chapter covers several APIs that may be used to interface with MySQL and MariaDB, so that you may write customized applications to interface with databases. There are sections for the C API, the Perl DBI, the PHP API, the Connector/Python, and the Ruby API. Many other programming languages have APIs for connecting to MySQL; these are just some of the more popular ones. The section on each API and related libraries includes a basic tutorial on how to connect to MySQL and MariaDB, and how to query a database with the API.

It’s unlikely you will need to know more than one API. Instead, you may want to read the section for the programming language you know and use. My preference is the Perl language and the Perl DBI. It’s most in line with natural languages such as English and Italian. If you have no preference and would like to learn a MySQL API, though, the PHP API is very popular and has many functions for interacting with MySQL. Plus, PHP is a fairly easy language to learn and you can use snippets of code within web pages and content management systems ...