MySQL™ labels itself "The World's Most Popular Open Source Database" - which is probably not an exaggeration. First released in 1995 at the start of the Internet boom, it quickly became the dominant web database thanks to its speed, compact size and comparative ease of use - and liberal licensing policy, being distributed from the start as open source (and later under the GPL license) and free for many purposes. MySQL's availability for up-and-coming web-server platforms such as Linux as well as ports for desktop systems such as Windows, at a time when the major players in the database industry were still concentrating on "big iron" datacenter hardware played an important role as well.

One of the great features of products like MySQL is that patches, bug fixes and new features can be rolled out as soon as they are available; typically on a much faster timeframe than other enterprise products.

So the Enterprise edition offers a new hot fix and service pack program that separate bug fixes and security issues from new features. The hot fixes are distributed and can be implemented immediately. The new features are distributed separately in both monthly and/or quarterly service packs. This separation enables the enterprise to keep the engine secure and implement new features to suit its own schedule.

MySQL provides some tools to monitor and troubleshoot a MySQL server, but they don't always suit a MySQL developer or administrator's common needs, or may not work in some scenarios, such as remote or over-the-web monitoring. Fortunately, the MySQL community has created a variety of free tools to fill the gaps. On the other hand, many of these are hard to find via web searches. In fact, web searches can be frustrating because they uncover abandoned or special-purpose, not ready-to-use projects. You could spend hours trying to find tools for monitoring and troubleshooting your MySQL servers. What's a tool-seeker to do?

Calistra's ODBC mySQL Administrator was the first graphical administration tool for mySQL and is still the only ODBC based tool.

This tutorial is intended to quickly bring you up to speed on connecting to the MySQL database using as PHP as the Web front end. It will have multiple examples of selects in their myirad forms. I'll also go over Inserts, Updates and Deletes.
This tutorial is NOT intended to teach you SQL or the internals of PHP. You should already know how to create tables and write the SQL queries manually. PHP is very easy to learn. If you have any scripting experience, picking up yet another scripting language will not be a problem.