Introduction

These functions allow you to access MySQL database servers. More information about MySQL can be found at http://www.mysql.com/.

Documentation for MySQL can be found at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/.

Requirements

In order to have these functions available, you must compile PHP with MySQL support.

Installation

By using the --with-mysql[=DIR] configuration option you enable PHP to access MySQL databases.

In PHP 4, the option --with-mysql is enabled by default. To disable this default behavior, you may use the --without-mysql configure option. Also in PHP 4, if you enable MySQL without specifying the path to the MySQL install DIR, PHP will use the bundled MySQL client libraries. In Windows, there is no DLL, it's simply built into PHP 4. Users who run other applications that use MySQL (for example, auth-mysql) should not use the bundled library, but rather specify the path to MySQL's install directory, like so: --with-mysql=/path/to/mysql. This will force PHP to use the client libraries installed by MySQL, thus avoiding any conflicts.

In PHP 5, MySQL is no longer enabled by default, nor is the MySQL library bundled with PHP. Read this FAQ for details on why. Because of this, Windows users will need to enable php_mysql.dll inside of php.ini and either copy libmysql.dll into the Windows system directory or make it available to the PATH. For compiling, simply use --with-mysql=[DIR] where [DIR] points to your MySQL installation directory.

This MySQL extension doesn't support full functionality of MySQL versions greater than 4.1.0. For that, use MySQLi.

If you would like to install the mysql extension along with the mysqli extension you have to use the same client library to avoid any conflicts.

Runtime Configuration

The behaviour of these functions is affected by settings in php.ini.

Here's a short explanation of the configuration directives.

Resource Types

There are two resource types used in the MySQL module. The first one is the link identifier for a database connection, the second a resource which holds the result of a query.

Predefined Constants

The constants below are defined by this extension, and will only be available when the extension has either been compiled into PHP or dynamically loaded at runtime.

Since PHP 4.3.0 it is possible to specify additional client flags for the mysql_connect() and mysql_pconnect() functions. The following constants are defined:

The function mysql_fetch_array() uses a constant for the different types of result arrays. The following constants are defined:

Examples

This simple example shows how to connect, execute a query, print resulting rows and disconnect from a MySQL database.

Example 1. MySQL extension overview example <?php /* Connecting, selecting database */ $link = mysql_connect("mysql_host", "mysql_user", "mysql_password")     or die("Could not connect : " . mysql_error()); echo "Connected successfully"; mysql_select_db("my_database") or die("Could not select database"); /* Performing SQL query */ $query = "SELECT * FROM my_table"; $result = mysql_query($query) or die("Query failed : " . mysql_error()); /* Printing results in HTML */ echo "<table>\n"; while ($line = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {     echo "\t<tr>\n";     foreach ($line as $col_value) {         echo "\t\t<td>$col_value</td>\n";     }     echo "\t</tr>\n"; } echo "</table>\n"; /* Free resultset */ mysql_free_result($result); /* Closing connection */ mysql_close($link); ?>