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The MySQL DBMS

MySQL is a medium-scale DBMS, with most of the features of a large-scale system and the ability to manage very large quantities of data. Its design is ideally suited to managing the databases that are typical of many web database applications.

The difference between MySQL and some other systems is that MySQL is missing some querying support and has limited concurrency-handling abilities. In terms of concurrency, tens of middle-tier processes can access a database at the same time but not hundreds. Two querying techniques-specifically nested querying and views-aren't supported, but support is planned for the near future in MySQL Version 4. There are other, more minor limitations that don't typically affect web development.

The limitations of MySQL usually have a very minor impact on web database application development. However, for high-throughput systems, large numbers of concurrent users, or applications that modify the database frequently, other DBMSs may be considered. Our second choice would be PostgreSQL, which is known to be slower but supports more concurrent users. More information on PostgreSQL can be found at http://www.postgresql.org.

At the time of writing, the current version of MySQL is 3.23, and the current release is 3.23.38. MySQL resources are listed in Appendix E.

SQL

SQL is the standard relational database interaction language. Almost all relational database systems, including MySQL, support SQL as the tool to create, manage, secure, and query databases. Indeed, this is an important point about SQL: it is much more than just a query language; it is a fully fledged tool for all aspects of database management.

History

SQL has had a complicated life. It began at the IBM San Jose Research Laboratory in the early 1970s, where it was known as Sequel; some users still call it Sequel, though it's more correctly referred to by the three-letter acronym, SQL. After almost 16 years of development and differing implementations, the standards organizations ANSI and ISO published an SQL standard in 1986. IBM published a different standard one year later!

Since the mid-1980s, three subsequent standards have been published by ANSI and ISO. The first, SQL-89, is the most widely, completely implemented SQL in popular database systems. Many systems implement only some features of the next release, SQL-2 or SQL-92, and almost no systems have implemented the features of the most recently approved standard, SQL-99 or SQL-3.

We focus on features found in the MySQL DBMS. MySQL supports the entry-level SQL-92 standard.