You do not have to be a mechanic to drive a car, but there has to be an engine under the hood or it will not move. To run an application that uses a database, there has to be a database engine under the hood. Database servers used to be dedicated computers; chances are Karl Malden and Michael Douglas used a database server in the TV series I mentioned earlier.

Today, database servers are usually software packages. Oracle Corporation specializes in database software; Microsoft has several SQL Server products. These packages can be installed on dedicated computers to function solely as a database server, but we can also install them on the same computer that acts as a Web Server, as well as on our own development system. The package we are going to use is called MySQL.

MySQL is open source, which means free, database server that was created by a Swedish company acquired by Sun Microsystems, which was in turn acquired by Oracle.

If you have installed a bundle such as XAMPP or WAMPSERVER...