LXI. MySQL Functions

These functions allow you to access MySQL database servers. In order to have these functions available, you must compile PHP with MySQL support by using the --with-mysql option. If you use this option without specifying the path to MySQL, PHP will use the built-in MySQL client libraries. Users who run other applications that use MySQL (for example, running PHP 3 and PHP 4 as concurrent apache modules, or auth-mysql) should always specify the path to MySQL: --with-mysql=/path/to/mysql. This will force PHP to use the client libraries installed by MySQL, avoiding any conflicts.

More information about MySQL can be found at http://www.mysql.com/.

Documentation for MySQL can be found at http://www.mysql.com/documentation/.

The behaviour of the MySQL functions is affected by settings in the global configuration file.

For further details and definition of the PHP_INI_* constants see ini_set().

This simple example shows how to connect, execute a query, print resulting rows and disconnect from a MySQL database.

Example 1. MySQL extension overview example <?php // Connecting, selecting database $link = mysql_connect("mysql_host", "mysql_login", "mysql_password") or die("Could not connect"); print "Connected successfully"; mysql_select_db("my_database") or die("Could not select database"); // Performing SQL query $query = "SELECT * FROM my_table"; $result = mysql_query($query) or die("Query failed"); // Printing results in HTML print "<table>\n"; while ($line = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) { print "\t<tr>\n"; foreach ($line as $col_value) { print "\t\t<td>$col_value</td>\n"; } print "\t</tr>\n"; } print "</table>\n"; // Free resultset mysql_free_result($result); // Closing connection mysql_close($link); ?>