If you have a little experience working in the world of web design and working with PHP, you must have heard the word MySQL and the question has come to you, what is MySQL? In this article and tutorial, we want to answer this question completely and also say what is the use of MySQL? What is a query and how does the SQL language help us? Join me in this article and tutorial file.
If we want to answer the question “What is MySQL?”, we can raise very advanced and bizarre topics that very experts can understand. But we have no such intention. In this article, we want to examine very simply what is MySQL? And what is its use?
To answer the question “What is MySQL?”, It is good to first get acquainted with the concept of a database in general.
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Name, Surname and Phonebook game
If you remember your elementary school years, you must remember that before the teacher came to class, two people wrote the names “good” and “bad” on the board. Or in another example, when we were playing “Name, Surname”, we wrote a set of names, surnames, cities, countries, and so on.
In the first example, the names of people, and in the second example, the names of cities, countries, fruits, and so on, are all types of information, each stored somewhere, one on a blackboard and the other on paper.
The job of a database is to store a set of information for us in different tables and columns. As the name implies, the database is a place for our data and information!
Another example
To give another very simple example, the phone book in most of our homes that contains the phone numbers of friends and actions is a database of people and their names.
In the world of computers and the Internet, we deal with a lot of information in many places. for example:
- Our website may have many users and we want to have a list of our site users.
- Or we may need a list of content, comments, news, and more for our website.
To store this information on the web, we need a database that stores this information so that we can access it in the future (as we would occasionally go to the phone book and ask for numbers we used it inside)
What is a Database?
After this introduction, we can now simply say that:
A database is a place where we can store our various information for future use.
In this regard, we want to answer the question “What is MySQL?”:
MySQL is a database management system that we can use to create and manage a database. Also we can call it DBMS for short.
In fact, MySQL’s job is to make it easy for us to use and manage the database. Here’s how MySQL can manage, edit, or delete our data.
What is the use of MySQL?
You may be wondering what MySQL is for. Very good question. In the world of computers, software, applications, websites and… one thing is very important: data!
What do we mean by data? Everything we see in software, applications, websites and… Like:
- Products of Amazon website
- Orangency website educational articles
- List of drivers around you on Uber
- Photos, videos, stories, captions, comments and… on Instagram
- And …
All the information, text, photos, videos and everything you see in software, applications, sites, etc., is a series of information stored in a database. Then, using web design programming languages, that information is taken from the database and displayed to you in the form of texts, photos, videos, products, and so on.
In answer to the question “What is MySQL?”, We can say that MySQL is a software and system that can store and manage all this information for us!
What are the features of MySQL?
To answer the question “What is MySQL?”, We want to talk about the features of MySQL. MySQL, as a software and database management system, has many features, some of which are mentioned below:
- high efficiency
- Low cost to set up and maintain
- Ease of setting up and learning
- Very good support
- High application on the web
- Very good relationship with PHP programming language
What is a query?
As we said, MySQL is a system for managing our information and data and we can store all kinds of data in it.
But imagine when the amount of this data increases and you need to do something special about this data. For example, you want:
- Delete a specific data
- Edit part of a data
- Add a new data
- Or look for new data
For example, in the phonebook, you want to delete a person’s number, edit their number or name, add a new number to your phonebook, or search for a specific number.
You do this using queries. In fact, a query is an instruction that you give to your database and ask it to do one of the above for you. In fact, queries are your requests from the database.