MySQL Cookbook, 3rd Edition

Preface

The MySQL database management system is popular for many reasons. It’s fast, and it’s easy to set up, use, and administer. It runs under many varieties of Unix and Windows, and MySQL-based programs can be written in many languages.

MySQL’s popularity raises the need to address questions its users have about how to solve specific problems. That is the purpose of MySQL Cookbook: to serve as a handy resource to which you can turn for 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, or develop a script to solve a problem of limited and specific scope. This book doesn’t develop full-fledged, complex applications. Instead, it assists you in developing such applications yourself by helping you get past problems that have you stumped.

For example, a common question is, “How can I deal with quotes and special characters in data values when I’m writing queries?” That’s not difficult, but figuring out how to do it is frustrating when you’re not sure where to start. This book demonstrates what to do; it shows you where to begin and how to proceed from there. ...