Creating a table to save your results and linking your form to it

This recipe is the basic building block of connecting your form to a table in the database. A few quick definitions and explanations may be helpful before we start.

Joomla! almost always uses a database engine called MySQL, and the language that we use to give instructions (often called "queries") to the database engine is MySQL, or sometimes just SQL for short (though technically SQL is something a little different). A typical MySQL query looks something like this:

SELECT `column_1`, `column-2` FROM `table_name` WHERE `column_1` = 'some_value';.

The MySQL engine is capable of running many databases; Joomla! typically uses just one — sometimes called a schema, and this database has many tables. A default Joomla! installation has around 36 tables, and each extension that you install will add more.

A useful way to think of a table is as a grid of rows and columns; each row is one record in the database, and each column is a...