If you've been following out HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP tutorials, you've probably built a website with a layout and functionality you like, but it's just missing one ingredient: a way to store and retrieve data. In steps MySQL, the most popular free and open source database system. There's not a huge amount to say about MySQL - it's a database, it's free and for most tasks it performs well. If you don't know what a database is, we'd recommend you read the Wikipedia article, but for these tutorials you don't need to understand how a database works as all of the technical processing is hidden by the MySQL engine. We'll just learn how to add, retrieve and update data.

Before you start with MySQL, you should have a good knowledge of PHP and HTML from our earlier tutorials.

If you have anything to contribute to this tutorial, found a bug, or know a better way of achieving the same goal, please leave your response below.