Solution

The client program or programs are installed locally on the machine from
which you wish to access MySQL, but the server can be installed
anywhere, as long as clients can connect to it. MySQL is an inherently
networked database system, so clients can communicate with a
server that is running locally on your machine or one that is running
somewhere else, perhaps on a machine on the other side of the
planet. Clients can be written for many different purposes, but each
interacts with the server by connecting to it, sending SQL queries to
it to have database operations performed, and receiving the query
results from it.
One such client is the mysql program that is included in MySQL
distributions. When used interactively, mysql prompts for a query,
sends it to the MySQL server for execution, and displays the results.
This capability makes mysql useful in its own right, but it’s also a
valuable tool to help you with your MySQL programming activities.
It’s often convenient to be able to quickly review the structure of a
table that you’re accessing from within a script, to try a query before
using it in a program to make sure it produces the right kind of
output, and so forth. mysql is just right for these jobs. mysql also can
be used non-interactively, for example, to read queries from a file or
from other programs. This allows you to use it from within scripts or
cron jobs or in conjunction with other applications.
This chapter describes mysql‘s capabilities so that you can use it
more effectively. Of course, to try out for yourself the recipes and
examples shown in this book, you’ll need a MySQL user account and
a database to work with. The first two sections of the chapter
describe how to use mysql to set these up. For demonstration
purposes, the examples assume that you’ll use MySQL as follows:
The MySQL server is running on the local host.
Your MySQL username and password are cbuser and cbpass.
Your database is named cookbook.
For your own experimentation, you can violate any of these
assumptions. Your server need not be running locally, and you need
not use the username, password, or database name that are used in
this book. Naturally, if you don’t use MySQL in the manner just
described, you’ll need to change the examples to use values that are
appropriate for your system. Even if you do use different names, I
recommend that you at least create a database specifically for trying
the recipes shown here, rather than one you’re using currently for
other purposes. Otherwise, the names of your existing tables may
conflict with those used in the examples, and you’ll have to make
modifications to the examples that are unnecessary when you use a
separate database.