MySQL and mSQL

mSQL Utilities

We have already covered one of the utilities that ships with mSQL, msqladmin. mSQL provides seven basic utilities for basic interaction with mSQL. In addition to those basic utilities, mSQL supports a lightweight scripting utility called Lite and a web interface called W3-mSQL. Third party developers support numerous tools beyond those that come with mSQL. We will now take a detailed look at the basic mSQL utilities beyond msqladmin and then skim over the list of third party tools. We will address Lite and W3-mSQL later in the book.

Command Line Tools

Each mSQL command line tool comes with detailed help to explain its syntax. In general, however, the syntax mirrors that of the msqladmin command. Specifically, a -h option enables you to specify a host and a -f options enables you to name a specific configuration file.

msql

This tool is a command line interface into mSQL that enables you to interactively execute SQL against a specific database. In addition to the common options described above, you specify which database you wish to work against. Of all the commands that come with mSQL, this is likely the one you will use the most.

msqldump

This command outputs the complete contents of a table or a whole database, including the table structure itself, as a series of SQL statements. The output of this utility can be used to backup a database and recreate it on another machine.

msqlimport

This command reads a formatted file of data and inserts the data into the specified ...