MySQL Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Preface

The MySQL database management system has gained a large following in recent years. This has been true especially in the Linux and open source communities, but MySQL has an increasing foothold in the commercial sector as well. MySQL is well liked for several reasons: it’s fast, and it’s easy to set up, use, and administer. MySQL runs under many varieties of Unix and Windows, and MySQL-based programs can be written in many languages. Historically, MySQL has been especially popular for constructing database-backed web sites that involve dynamic content generation. Moreover, with the introduction of features in MySQL 5.0 such as views, triggers, and stored procedures and functions, the penetration of MySQL into other areas of application development is on the upswing.

With MySQL’s popularity comes the need to address the questions posed by its users about how to solve specific problems. That is the purpose of MySQL Cookbook. It’s designed to serve as a handy resource to which you can turn when you need quick solutions or techniques for attacking particular types of questions that come up when you use MySQL. Naturally, because it’s a cookbook, it contains recipes: straightforward instructions you can follow rather than develop your own code from scratch. It’s written using a problem-and-solution format designed to be extremely practical and to make the contents easy to read and assimilate. It contains many short sections, each describing how to write a query, apply a technique, ...