Specifications

If it isn’t your machine, make sure that you typed in the password correctly.

You should now be at a MySQL command prompt, ready to create the database.

If you are using your own machine, follow the guidelines in the next section.

If you are using somebody else’s machine, this should already have been done for you. You

can jump ahead to the “Using the Right Database” section. You might want to read the inter-

vening sections for general background, but you won’t be able to run the commands specified

there. (Or at least you shouldn’t be able to!)

Creating Databases and Users

The MySQL database system can support many different databases. You will generally have

one database per application. In our Book-o-Rama example, the database will be called

books.

Creating the Database

This is the easiest part. At the MySQL command prompt, type

mysql> create database dbname;

You should substitute the name of the database you want to create for dbname. To begin creat-

ing the Book-O-Rama example, you can create a database called books.

That’s it. You should see a response like

Query OK, 1 row affected (0.06 sec)

This means everything has worked. If you don’t get this response, make sure that you typed

the semicolon at the end of the line. A semicolon tells MySQL that you are finished, and it

should actually execute the command.

Users and Privileges

A MySQL system can have many users. The root user should generally be used for administra-

tion purposes only, for security reasons. For each user who needs to use the system, you will

need to set up an account and password. These do not need to be the same as usernames and

passwords outside of MySQL (for example, UNIX or NT usernames and passwords). The

same principle applies to root. It is a good idea to have different passwords for the system and

for MySQL, especially when it comes to the root password.

It isn’t compulsory to set up passwords for users, but we strongly recommend that you set up

passwords for all the users that you create.

Creating Your Web Database

HAPTER 8

CREATING YOUR

WEB DATABASE

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