I H ave To Know...........

[Kevinnaia]

What is MySQL and Access (I have Microsoft Access 2000 on my computer, but I don't know what is does on the internet), and what do they do???

[cbkihong]

MySQL is a relational database management system available on many commercial web server systems.

MS Access is also a database management system, but it's available on Windows PCs only.

MS Access databases are saved in separate .mdb files, while MySQL resides on a server and all data administered by MySQL are stored in the central database instead of in separate files.

Unless you are a business user (many enterprises adopting an entire MS solution use Access because of its immediate readiness to allow inclusion in other Office applications and make graphs etc., many of the features of Access are not supposed to be provided by a DBMS but simply included for convenience reasons -- that's why Access are business-oriented instead of a general-purpose DBMS), you don't have much practical use of Access, particularly at home.

A discussion forum script may store the postings into MySQL database and retrieve them when people need to read them, for example.

Microsoft SQL Server is more MySQL alike than Access, but $$$ makes it hardly deployable for most web servers.

My advice is that you don't jump to MySQL too soon yet. It's NOT easy to master unless you have programmed for some while. You have to know HTML and some sort of server-side programming like PHP before you can use MySQL because eventually you will need to present the data in MySQL databases in HTML format and your MySQL queries need to be executed through server scripts. You can't do MySQL without (adequate) knowledge in either area.