Book Image

PHPEclipse: A User Guide

Book Image

PHPEclipse: A User Guide

Overview of this book

The fusion of Eclipse, the leading open source development environment, and PHP is an exciting prospect for web developers. This book makes sure that you are up and running as quickly as possible, ready to take full advantage of PHPEclipse's tuned PHP development tools, without requiring any prior knowledge of Eclipse. You will begin with installing and configuring PHPEclipse, before moving onto a tour of the Eclipse environment, familiarizing you with its main components. As a plug-in to Eclipse, PHPEclipse is able to harness the platform to provide a rich and powerful development experience. For helping you improve the efficiency of your PHP coding, the book details the powerful editing features of PHPEclipse, and shows you how to use it to better organize your application code. You will see how PHPEclipse helps you throughout the development lifecycle, and learn how to use PHPEclipse's debugger to troubleshoot and step through your PHP code as it executes. The book rounds off with coverage of accessing databases and managing source code from within the. For the final step for your application, you will learn how to deploy your site to a production server."
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Relational Databases

A vast majority of modern databases are still relational databases. The entire database system is referred to as a relational database management system (RDBMS). RDBMSs group related data into table structures. Each stored record is a row in the table. Columns in the table define what is stored in each table. A column has strict rules that lay down what is allowed in each row’s entry for that column. For example, some columns only allow integers, and some must be filled with a value while some can be left blank. The ‘relational’ part of a RDBMS comes from the relationships between the tables. Tables can, and usually do, have keys. Each key is a unique identifier for the record in a table. This can be as complex as multiple columns designated as a key, or as simple as a column holding a unique number. Keys can be referenced in other tables. These references make up relationships.

SQL (pronounced ‘es-que-el’) is the standard language...