MySQL Technical Reference Manual. Introduction [p 5] General Information about MySQL [p 6] What is MySQL? [p 6] History of MySQL [p 6] The main features in MySQL [p 6] What is the current MySQL version? [p 7] How do I get MySQL? [p 7] Should I get MySQL in source or binary distribution? [p 8] Which operating systems does MySQL support? [p 8] What languages are supported by MySQL. [p 8] How/when will you release updates? [p 9] What is UNIREG ? [p 9] General SQL information and tutorials [p 10] What are stored procedurs and triggers and so on [p 10] MySQL mailing lists and how to ask questions [p 11] Subscribing to/un-subscribing from the MySQL mailing list. [p 11] Asking questions or reporting bugs. [p 11] Guidelines for answering questions on the mailing list. [p 12] When do I have/want to pay for MySQL? [p 13] How much does MySQL cost? [p 13] How do I get comercial support [p 14] Types of comercial support [p 14] How do I pay for a license? [p 15] Who do I contact when I want support/a license? [p 15] What Copyright does MySQL use? [p 16] When may I distribute MySQL commercially without a fee [p 16] I’m selling a product that can be configured to use MySQL [p 17] I am running a commercial web server using MySQL. [p 17] Do I need a license to sell commercial perl/tcl/PHP etc applications? [p 17] Possible future changes in the licensing. [p 18] How standards compatible are MySQL [p 19] What extension has MySQL to ANSI SQL92? [p 19] What functionality is missing in MySQL. [p 20] What standards does MySQL follow? [p 21] What functions exist only for compatibility? [p 21] Limitations of BLOB and TEXT types [p 21] How to go cope without COMMIT-ROLLBACK [p 21] Compiling and installing MySQL [p 24] Compiling MySQL [p 24] Problems starting MySQL [p 24] Automatic start/stop of MySQL [p 25] How to debug MySQL [p 25] How does MySQL privileges work [p 26] How does the privilege system work? [p 26] 1 Adding new user privileges to MySQL [p 28] Default privileges. [p 28] A example of permission setup. [p 29] MySQL language reference [p 30] Literals. How do you write strings and numbers? [p 30] Column types. [p 31] More about data types [p 33] Database size info. [p 33] The numeric types [p 33] TIMESTAMP type [p 33] TEXT and BLOB types [p 33] ENUM type [p 34] SET type [p 34] Column indexes [p 35] Multiple field indexes [p 35] Type mapping (to ease moving tabel definitions between different databases engines) [p 35] CREATE TABLE syntax. [p 36] ALTER TABLE syntax [p 37] DROP TABLE syntax. [p 38] DELETE syntax. [p 38] SELECT syntax [p 39] Functions [p 40] INSERT syntax [p 45] LOAD DATA INFILE syntax [p 45] UPDATE syntax [p 47] SHOW syntax. Get information about names of columns. [p 47] EXPLAIN syntax. Get information about a SELECT. [p 47] DESCRIBE syntax. Get information about columns. [p 48] Lock tables syntax [p 48] SET OPTION syntax. [p 48] GRANT syntax. (Compatibility function). [p 49] CREATE INDEX syntax (Compatibility function). [p 49] DROP INDEX syntax (Compatibility function). [p 49] Is MySQL picky about reserved words? [p 49] How safe/stable is MySQL [p 52] How stable is MySQL? [p 52] Why are there is so many release of MySQL? Is it because there are so many bugs? [p 54] Checking a table for errors. [p 54] How to repair tables. [p 55] Is there anything special to do when upgrading/downgrading MySQL? [p 56] How to get maximum performance out of MySQL [p 57] How does MySQL use memory ? [p 57] How does MySQL use keys? [p 58] How does MySQL open & close tables? [p 59] How should I arrange my table to be as fast/small as possible? [p 59] What affects the speed of the INSERT statement? [p 60] 2 What affects the speed of DELETE statement? [p 60] What kind of optimisation is done on the WHERE clause? [p 60] How can I change the buffer sizes of mysqld ? [p 61] What options to use to get MySQL to run at full speed? [p 62] How to get MySQL to run as fast as possible with little memory? [p 62] What are the different row formats? Or when to use VARCHAR/CHAR? [p 63] Why so many open tables? [p 64] MySQL Utilites [p 65] Overview of the different MySQL programs [p 65] The MySQL table check, optimize and repair program [p 66] Getting low level table information [p 66] The MySQL compressed read only table generator [p 70] Adding functions to MySQL [p 75] Adding new functions to MySQL [p 75] ODBC [p 76] Which operating systems does MySQL ODBC support? [p 76] How should I report problems with MySQL ODBC? [p 76] Programs known to work with MyODBC. [p 76] How do I fill in the various fields in the ODBC administrator program? [p 76] Problems [p 78] Why do I get ’Access denied’? [p 78] How to run MySQL as a normal user. [p 79] Problems with file permissions [p 79] Problems using DATE fields. [p 80] MySQL client tools and API’s [p 81] MySQL C API [p 81] Why is it that after mysql_query() returns success, mysql_store_result() sometimes returns NULL? [p 82] What results can I get from a query? [p 83] How can I get the unique ID for the last row? [p 83] What is the difference between mysql_use_result() and mysql_store_result() modes? [p 83] Problems linking with C API. [p 84] How to make a threadsafe client [p 84] Making a threadsafe client [p 84] What is the difference between different thread packages? [p 85] MySQL Perl API’s [p 85] mysqlperl [p 85] DBD::mysql [p 85] MySQL JAVA connectivity (JDBC) [p 85] MySQL C++ API’s [p 85] MySQL TCL API’s [p 85] MySQL Python API’s [p 86] MySQL Python API’s [p 86] How does MySQL compare with other databases [p 87] How does MySQL compare with mSQL [p 87] How about mSQL tools like msql-tcl, msqljava? [p 88] 3 How different from mSQL are the MySQL client/server communications protocols? [p 88] What are the differences in the SQL syntax between MySQL & mSQL 2.0? [p 89] Problems with AND and OR priority [p 91] This document was generated on 3 November 1997 using the texi2html translator version 1.51 (extended by [email protected]). 4 Go to the first, previous, next [p 6] , last [p 87] section, table of contents [p 1] . Introduction This is the technical manual about MySQL. This version is about the 3.21.x version of MySQL. This document contains the basic documenatation about MySQL. The latest version of this manual can be found at http://www.tcx.se/ This manual is currently available in TeXInfo, Raw text, Info, Postscript and HTML versions. The primary document is the TeXInfo file. The HTML version is automatically produced with texi2html. The ASCII and info version is produced using makeinfo. The Postscript version is produced using texi2dvi and divps. If you have any suggestions concerning additions or corrections, please send them to the MySQL mailing list [email protected] withthe following subject line; documentation suggestion: [Insert Topic Here]. See section Subscribing to/un-subscribing from the MySQL mailing list. [p 11] . This manual is written and maintained by David Axmark, Michael (Monty) Widenius and Kim Aldale. Go to the first, previous, next [p 6] , last [p 87] section, table of contents [p 1] . 5 Go to the first [p 5] , previous [p 5] , next [p 11] , last [p 87] section, table of contents [p 1] . General Information about MySQL What is MySQL? MySQL is a SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. SQL is the most popular database language in the world. MySQL is a client server implementation that consists of a server daemon mysqld and many different client programs/libraries. The main goals of MySQL are speed and robustness. The base upon which MySQL is built is a set of routines that have been used in a highly demanding production environment for many years. While MySQL is currently still in development it already offers a rich and highly useful function set. <P> See the ‘CREDITS’ file in the distribution for persons that have been involved in the MySQL project. History of MySQL We once started off with the intension to use mSQL to connect to our own fast low level (ISAM) tables. However, after some testing we came to the conclusion that mSQL was not fast or flexible enough for our needs. This resulted in a new SQL interface to our database but with almost the same API interface as mSQL. This API was chosen to ease porting of third party code. It is not perfectly clear where the name MySQL derives from. Our base directory and a large amount of our libraries and tools have had the prefix ’my’ for well over 10 years. However, Monty’s daughter (some years younger) is also named My. So which of the two gave its name to MySQL is still a mystery, even for us. The main features in MySQL Multi-threaded. C, C++, JAVA, Perl, Python and TCL API’s. See section MySQL client tools and API’s [p 81] Lots of column types like: signed/unsigned integers 1,2,3,4,8 bytes long, FLOAT, CHAR, VARCHAR, TEXT, BLOB, DATE, SET and ENUM types.