> PHP > Course 3: Talking to a MySQL Database in PHP
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04.

Updating, Deleting and Putting it All Together

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Updating, Deleting and Putting it All Together

When you’re all done running queries, just type quit.

Now let’s put this all together. MySQL is a database software that runs on a server and listens to port 3306. We tell the mysql program that there is database software running on some computer and that it’s waiting for us to talk to it on port 3306. In this case, the database is right on our computer, so we use localhost instead of the IP address of some other machine. We also give it a username and password that it uses to log into the MySQL server.

We can actually shorten the command that opens the connection to MySQL:

mysql -u root -p

We’re removed the -h and --port options, because the program uses localhost and port 3306 by default.

Once we’ve connected to the MySQL server, it contains many databases. We created one, and we can get a full list using the SHOW DATABASES query:

SHOW DATABASES;

To actually make queries to our database, we have to use it:

USE air_pup;

Inside our database, we created one table. We can see all our tables using the SHOW TABLES query:

SHOW TABLES;

If you want to see what columns a table has, try the DESCRIBE query:

DESCRIBE pet;

Nice! But here’s a secret: all those commands and queries we just reviewed aren’t really that important. Yea, you need to understand them, but you won’t be creating databases or even tables that often. 99% of the time, you’ll be adding, updating, reading or deleting data. So if you want to get dangerous with MySQL, focus on the INSERT, UPDATE, SELECT and DELETE commands.

UPDATE a row

Let’s see an UPDATE query in action by capitalizing Spark Pug’s breed. The id of his row is 2, so we’ll add a WHERE clause to the end of the query so that only his row changes:

UPDATE pet SET breed='PUG' WHERE id = 2;

Check it out by selecting all the rows:

SELECT * FROM pet;

DELETE a row

So actually, you can add a WHERE clause to the end of a SELECT, UPDATE or DELETE query. Let’s remove Pico de Gato by matching on her name:

DELETE FROM pet WHERE name = 'Pico de Gato';

Yep, looks like that works! So that’s basically it! You’re now pretty dangerous with MySQL. In a second, we’ll get real crazy by talking to MySQL from inside PHP.

PHPMyAdmin: Database GUI

So far, I’ve been making you communicate with MySQL directly using its native language: queries. But there are also some pretty nice GUI’s to help you see your data, build queries, and even make tables.

The most popular is probably PHPMyAdmin. It’s actually a website, writen in - surprise! - PHP! It runs on your local computer, and if you installed XAMPP, you can already access it by going to http://localhost/phpmyadmin:

http://localhost/phpmyadmin

Oh, and if this doesn’t work, make sure that Apache is running. For XAMPP, you can do this in its control panel - we turned Apache off in episode 1, just to prove how we weren’t using it for our site.

PHPMyAdmin is easy, and there’s plenty of docs online for it. Let’s navigate to our database and table to check out the data. It even helps us filter the results and show the query that it’s using with MySQL behind the scenes.

While we’re here, let’s add the rest of the columns we need on the pet table. These will be the same as what we have in the pets.json file, so we’ll add age, weight, bio and image:

Column Name Type Length
age varchar 255
weight integer 4
bio text  
image varchar 255

Beyond choosing the data type, each column has some other options. These are less important, but you can google them if you’re curious.

So now our table is setup and we have an easy way to see and play with our data. Behind the scenes, queries are being sent to our MySQL server software, PHPMyAdmin is just taking care of that for us.