By Paul Dubois

Database management systems implement abstract concepts but do so on real hardware bound by real physical constraints. As a result, queries take time—sometimes an annoyingly long time. Find out how to minimize your wait in this sample chapter.

The world of relational database theory is a world dominated by tables and sets, and operations on tables and sets. A database is a set of tables, and a table is a set of rows and columns. When you issue a SELECT statement to retrieve rows from a table, you get back another set of rows and columns—that is, another table. These are abstract notions that make no reference to the underlying representation a database system uses to operate on the data in your tables. Another abstraction is that operations on tables happen all at once; queries are conceptualized as set operations and there is no concept of time in set theory.

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By Ziran Sun

The first part of this article illustrated how to install and configure the MySQL Database Server, install and use the MySQL Administrator, create a new database, and create and populate a new sample table with some sample data.

Now that the database server is up and running, this part of the article will complete our coverage of using MySQL with ASP.NET by covering how to:

• Add a new MySQL user.
• Assign the new user the appropriate permisions to the database.
• Connect to the MySQL server from .NET.
• Build a simple ASP.NET page to query the database.

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By Ziran Sun

Introduction

Back in the days of classic ASP, if you were building a database-driven web site, your choice was either to invest a lot of money to get a copy of Microsoft SQL Server (or some other enterprise-ready database) or invest a lot of time finding a way to deal with the performance and scalability limitations of Microsoft Access. Luckily these days there’s another viable alternative: MySQL.

What is MySQL?

MySQL is an open source database server. While many organizations may choose to purchase a commercial version of the product, the GNU General Public License (commonly known as the “GPL”) ensures that the source code will remain available and therefore the software can be used free of charge for those willing to forego official support and support it themselves.

For more information, see the MySQL website.

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