What is MySQL? Free online PHP and MySQL Web Database Programming Tutorial...

What is MySQL?
MySQL is a database and a database management system. Strictly speaking MySQL is the most popular open-source database system.

Like any other relational database system, the data in MySQL is stored in tables. A table consists of rows and columns. Columns are also referred to as attributes and the rows are also known as records.

A table is a collections of related data entries. A database may have one of more tables. Each table has a name to identify it in the database.

Databases are really very useful when we need to store categorized information. For example a university may have a database with the following tables:

"Students",
"Faculty",
"Subjects" and
"Classes".

Following is an example of a database table called "students":

Name	Class	GPA	Address
Danial	BCS	3.21	Danial House
Jacob	MBA	3.65	Jacob House
Adam	BSC	2.45	Adam House

The abve table contains three records (one for each student) and four columns (Name, Class, GPA, and Address).

What are MySQL database Queries?
A query is a question or a request. A MySQL database query is a question or a request to the MySQL database that is written in a specific format. Through a database query we request the database management system for some specific information. In response to a query MySQL returns a recordset having the specific information that was requested through the query.

Example

SELECT Name FROM students

The above query selects all the data in the "Name" column from the "students" table, and returns a recordset like following:

LastName
Danial
Jacob
Adam

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