Introduction

Every typical web application needs some sort of persistent data storage on the backend. OpenShift supports a number of options to store your data, including several third-party providers that liberate you from having to deal with hardware provisioning and database management. At the time of writing this book, OpenShift officially supports the MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB data stores. Apart from these supported databases, there are third-party downloadable database cartridges available for data stores, such as Redis and MariaDB. Red Hat does not support downloadable cartridges, so you have to use them at your own risk. This chapter will cover the MySQL cartridge in detail. Chapter 5, Using PostgreSQL with OpenShift Applications, and Chapter 6, Using MongoDB and Third-party Database Cartridges with OpenShift Applications, will cover the PostgreSQL and MongoDB cartridges respectively.

This chapter will use the PHP 5.4 application we created in Chapter 3, Creating and Managing...