Programming PHP

Relational Databases and SQL

A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a server that manages data for you. The data is structured into tables, where each table has some number of columns, each of which has a name and a type. For example, to keep track of James Bond movies, we might have a “movies” table that records the title (a string), year of release (a number), and the actor who played Bond in each movie (an index into a table of Bond actors).

Tables are grouped together into databases, so a James Bond database might have tables for movies, actors playing Bond, and villains. An RDBMS usually has its own user system, which controls access rights for databases (e.g., “user Fred can update database Bond”).

PHP communicates with relational databases such as MySQL and Oracle using the Structured Query Language (SQL). You can use SQL to create, modify, and query relational databases.

The syntax for SQL is divided into two parts. The first, Data Manipulation Language, or DML, is used to retrieve and modify data in an existing database. DML is remarkably compact, consisting of only four verbs: select, insert, update, and delete. The set of SQL commands, used to create and modify the database structures that hold the data, is known as Data Definition Language, or DDL. The syntax for DDL is not as standardized as that for DML, but as PHP just sends any SQL commands you give it to the database, you can use any SQL commands your database supports.

Assuming you have a table ...