Switching to a MySQL database
As we earlier mentioned, we are using SQLite throughout this book because it is the simplest. However, we will explain how to switch to a more robust database engine called MySQL.
Note
The book code will be based on SQLite, so the changes in this section are optional and won't be reflected either in the GitHub book repository or in upcoming chapters.
MySQL
MySQL is a popular open source SQL database management system developed by Oracle. There are several different ways of installing MySQL. For this section, we will install MySQL and a MySQL administration tool called phpMyAdmin. Both tools can be found in a development environment called XAMPP. So, let's install XAMPP.
XAMPP
XAMPP is a popular PHP development environment. XAMPP is a free Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP, and Perl. XAMPP also includes phpMyAdmin. If you don't have XAMPP installed, go to https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html, download it...