Databases provide us with a way to store data and easily retrieve any that data later. Information is stored in structures called tables. Each table is made up of columns and rows. This can be conceptually visualized as a spreadsheet, though the functionality is very different. Each column is defined to hold a particular data type and is given a name. Rows actually hold the data. For the sake of simplicity, we will only cover the use of the MySQL database server. MySQL is also the preferred database within the PHP community as it has a free license just as PHP does and it is Open Source. MySQL is also a very common feature provided by web hosting companies. Using other database servers is very similar, so the concepts learned here can apply to those as well.
For the purposes of this section, we will assume that you already have a database to work with and an associated username and password for that database. This information should be provided to you by your hosting provider or system administrator. Throughout this section, we will use a database name of test and a username and password of username and password, respectively.
