Switching to a MySQL database

As we earlier mentioned, we use 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 is 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 is a popular open source SQL database management system developed by Oracle. There are several different ways to install 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 that.

XAMPP is a popular PHP development environment. It is a free Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP, and Perl. As previously mentioned, XAMPP also includes phpMyAdmin. If you don’t have XAMPP installed, go to https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html, download it, and install...