Nowadays, computers are present everywhere, and they are all connected to each other. A lot of information is exchanged between them, but this data needs to be stored somewhere.
MariaDB is a fork of MySQL, started when MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008. Sun Microsytems and MySQL were then acquired by Oracle in 2009.
In most Linux distributions, MariaDB is now the default package, providing a relational database that is compatible with MySQL.
MariaDB has interesting new features, better testing, performance improvement, and bug fixes that are not available in MySQL.
This book provides an introduction to the SQL language. It presents some advanced features of MariaDB and features that aren't present in MySQL but come with MariaDB. By the end of this book, you should be able get your own MariaDB database server running and take advantage of its features.
Chapter 1, Installing MariaDB, describes the steps that need be taken before starting to use MariaDB.
Chapter 2, Databases and Tables, explains how to create data structures.
Chapter 3, Getting Started with SQL, covers the statements used to add, modify, or delete data in a database and the queries used to extract information.
Chapter 4, Importing and Exporting Data, explains how to import and export data.
Chapter 5, Views and Virtual Columns, presents views and virtual columns, which are used to shift the data logic from an application to a database.
Chapter 6, Dynamic Columns, explains how to store heterogeneous data in MariaDB using dynamic columns.
Chapter 7, Full-Text Searches, presents different ways to do full-text searches with MariaDB.
Chapter 8, Using the CONNECT Storage Engine, presents the CONNECT storage engine and ways to connect external data sources directly to MariaDB.
To put the information provided in this book into practice, you need to install MariaDB on your computer. MariaDB runs on most operating systems, but the following are specifically mentioned in this book: Windows (from XP to Windows 8), Mac OS X, or a standard Linux distribution. Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat EL, among others, are also supported.
You will also need an Internet connection and the necessary administrative rights to install any software in order to install MariaDB.
No other software is required.
If you don't know the SQL language but want to quickly jump into the SQL world and learn how to use MariaDB, this is the book for you.
Alternatively, if you already know how to use MySQL but want to go further into it in detail, this book is ideal for you. You will learn all the features added in MariaDB but absent in MySQL.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Create a /tmp/mariadb/books2.xml file following this structure."
A block of code is set as follows:
<book id="bk101">
<author>
<last>Gambardella</last>
<first>Matthew</first>
</author>
<title>XML Developer's Guide</title>
<genre>Computer</genre>
<price>44.95</price>
<publish_date>2000-10-01</publish_date>
<description>An in-depth look at creating applications
with XML.</description>
</book>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
SELECT WEEKDAY(date), COUNT(*) FROM product_order WHERE YEAR(date) = YEAR(NOW()) GROUP BY WEEKDAY(date);
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."
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