Introduction

In this chapter, we will learn how to set up database servers. A database is the backbone of any application, enabling an application to efficiently store and retrieve crucial data to and from persistent storage. We will learn how to install and set up relational databases with MySQL and NoSQL databases with MongoDB.

MySQL is a popular open source database server used by various large scale applications. It is a mature database system that can be scaled to support large volumes of data. MySQL is a relational database and stores data in the form of rows and columns organized in tables. It provides various storage engines, such as MyISAM, InnoDB, and in-memory storage. MariaDB is a fork of a MySQL project and can be used as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. It was started by the developers of MySQL after Oracle took over Sun Microsystems, the owner of the MySQL project. MariaDB is guaranteed to be open source and offers faster security releases and advanced features. It provides additional storage engines, including XtraDB by Percona and Cassandra for the NoSQL backend. PostgreSQL is another well-known name in relational database systems.

NoSQL, on the other hand, is a non-relational database system. It is designed for distributed large-scale data storage requirements. For some types of data, it is not efficient to store it in the tabular form offered by relational database systems, for example, data in the form of a document. NoSQL databases are used for these types of data. Some emerging NoSQL categories are document storage, key value store, BigTable, and the graph database.

In this chapter, we will start by installing MySQL, followed by storing and manipulating data in MySQL. We will also cover user management and access control. After an introduction to relational databases, we will cover some advanced topics on scaling and high availability. We will learn how to set up the web administration tool, PHPMyAdmin, but the focus will be on working with MySQL through command line access. In later recipes, we will also cover the document storage server, MongoDB.