MySQL 5 Development (Part 1) Course

Welcome to Virtual Training Company's course on MYSQL 5 Development. My name is David Swain and I will be your guide to understanding how to take best advantage of the commands and other features of the MySQL Server that will become the core component of your database applications. So just what is MySQL and why would want to learn about it? MySQL is known as the world's most popular Open Source Database. It came into being to act as a database backend to the PHP scripting language allowing website developers to include up-to-the-minute database content on dynamically built web pages, and this is still its most prevalent use. But the attraction of a free or at least an inexpensive database server has led to an acceleration of the acceptance of MySQL in the workplace for normal, business-oriented database work as well. A few years ago, MySQL introduced what we could call its professional version, Version 5.0, which added most of the relational database and SQL features that many people felt were missing from earlier versions. A couple of revisions later, we're now up to Version 5.5, which introduced vast improvements in performance and other business-oriented improvements over its predecessors. It is the 5.5 version we will explore in this course, although most of what we cover here will apply equally to the earlier releases of Version 5. As with any sophisticated database server, MySQL is a vast subject of study. When I began exploring with VTC how we might build a comprehensive training program on MySQL we decided on a three-level approach. First, we would begin with introductory level courses, but just to get a good start at the introductory level there is still a lot to present if we're going to do justice to the subject. So we decided to split the introductory material into a course on MySQL 5 Development and another on MySQL 5 Administration, based on the common rules of database professionals in the workplace. But the classroom training I had given on those subjects over the years as a staff trainer for MySQL, and then for Sun Microsystems, and for Oracle Corporation, as MySQL was acquired by these other companies, were each 5 very full days. And as we looked at the outline for the course content, it became clear that we were going to need to split the material one more time. So both the MySQL 5 Development and the MySQL 5 Administration courses have a part one and part two. These are still not as comprehensive and detailed as my classroom training courses, but they will give you more thorough and useful information on MySQL than other online offerings I've seen. We will begin working primarily with the Shell Command Line in our interactions with the MySQL Server in these courses. We want you to see most clearly what commands the server receives and what responses it gives to those commands, without those things being masked by some arbitrary GUI interface. If there is demand, we will demonstrate the creation of GUI applications and offer training on some of the commonly GUI administration programs that are available in other courses, because those are also important parts of a database system that we would deploy to end-users. But our focus here is on communicating with the MySQL Server. The building of such applications and their interaction with the user are not our focus here. In the MySQL classes that I've given over the years I've been amused that many students some with significant MySQL experience, take professional MySQL training to in their words, learn the secrets of MySQL. What's funny about that? MySQL is an open-source product, there are no secrets of any kind in the software, but what MySQL has instead are many little-known or generally overlooked details that can make a world of difference in the production performance of a database installation. An understanding of these things, along with an understanding of the data we wish to track in our system, leads us to a formulation of best practices. Some of these are universal, but many depend on our individual situations and can vary from one MySQL installation to another. These are among the things you will learn in this series of courses. That is the overall plan of attack; we believe you will find this course, and your subsequent use of MySQL, to be well worth your time and effort. In the next lesson, we'll map out more specifically what we'll be covering in Part 1 of the MySQL 5 Development course.  

Download WorkFiles