Bin-Blog » MySQL

Interactive SQL Tutorial

Binny V A — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 19:00:44 +0000

I have completed a tutorial that I have been working on for a long time. Its the Interactive SQL(Structured Query Language) Tutorial – it teaches you the basics of SQL. SQL, for those of you who are unaware of it, is the language used to access and manipulate data within a database. It is very simple and very powerful.

Interactive SQL Query Box

The cool thing about the tutorial is that it is interactive – each vistor can have a personal sandboxed database in which they can run any query they want. I call it the interactive query box. You can test almost all the SQL statements in this box without worrying about data loss – all the data is stored temporarily in this system. But you will have to install an extension called Google Gears in your browser.

Google Gears

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. You can install it in Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you want to try out SQL queries as it is presented in the tutorial, you need this extension.

You can view the tutorial without this extension, but you will be missing out the coolest feature of the tutorial.

Simple Tutorial

I have tried to make the tutorial as simple as possible. If you have learned about RDBMS, you know there are stuff like Normal Forms and Cardinality and other brain numbing definitions. I have removed all but the most essential definitions in my tutorial – it makes it easier to understand.

Even after removing the confusing definitions, I have apologized about the rest…

Sorry if you find the definitions here a bit too much. Trust me – you are much better off here than if you are learning SQL from a database book. They are going to lay definitions on you till your eyes bleed. I have seen brave men die from too much exposure to definitions.

Its Funny

I have learned a lot of languages and programming techniques by reading books and sites – and one thing I have noticed is that most of the material is unbelievably dry. Its extremely hard to keep your eyes open when you read them. That is why head first books are so popular – they made learning fun.

Its been a policy of mine to inject humor into such tutorials – if you have read any of my earlier tutorials, you would know that…

Also, I am a humor blogger – so this stuff comes easily to me.

What I am trying to say is that the new SQL tutorial follows the same pattern – there is a lot of humor in it. So people can read it easily – without resorting to caffeine shots.

I Want Your Help…

Now that the writing part is over, I am proof-reading it. I have corrected a fair amount of stupid mistakes so far – but I am sure that there are many still left. I was hoping that a few of you would head over to my SQL Tutorial and go through it. If you notice any mistakes, just put it in the comment field at the end of each page. Once I fix an error, I’ll remove the comment – that way, when I launch the tutorial, people will think that there were no errors in my tutorial. Devious, isn’t it?

Installing LAMP(Apache Web Server/PHP/MySQL) in Debian/Ubuntu

Binny V A — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:10:07 +0000

Installing the LAMP environment on a Linux system is easy if you are comfortable with using the native package management software. If you on a Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS system, that will be yum – and for Debian/Ubuntu systems, that will be apt. This tutorial shows you how to install Apache 2, PHP 5 and MySQL 5 in Debian using apt.

Before installation, a few points to remember. These instruction are not for a production environment – this is for a development environment. To install the software, you need root access. You can get that using this command…

su -
[Enter root password]

Installing Apache 2

Use this command to install Apache 2.

apt-get install apache2

Make sure you specify ‘apache2′ – or else, apache 1.3 will be installed.

Install PHP 5

Now, install the PHP 5 packages…

apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php5-cli php5-common php5-cgi

No go to the folder /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ and edit the file in that directory(usually 000-default). Find the line that says
RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/
and remove it.

Now your document root is /var/www/ – place all your HTML documents and scripts in this folder. If you want to make some other configuration changes, edit the configuration files at /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

I also had to make the following changes…

Changed the owner of /var/log/apache2 to www-data – I used the command chown www-data:www-data apache2
Created an empty file at /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

This was to fix a few errors I saw on my system – you may not have to do it.

Install MySQL

This is the command to install MySQL server, its client and PHP’s MySQL libraries…

apt-get install mysql-client mysql-common mysql-server php5-mysql

Finally, Install the other packages you need as well

apt-get install php5-sqlite php5-gd ...

Testing the System

Go to your document root(/var/www) and create a php files called ‘info.php’ and put this code inside that…

info();

Start the Servers

First, turn on the MySQL database server…

/etc/init.d/mysql start

Then, start the Apache Web Server…

/etc/init.d/apache2 start

Now fire up a browser and go to localhost – you should see a file listing page with a ‘info.php’ in the list. Click on that link – if you see a PHP information page, your web server is setup correctly.

To make sure MySQL-PHP connection is working, install phpMyAdmin – or write a database connection script – whatever is easier for you.