How to Use a Simple Database Connection Class - PHP MySQL Database package blog

In this article you will learn:

What is the PHP MySQL Database Class

How to Configure the Database Access to Use This Class

How to Query a Database

How to Setup a Database Connection

How to Query a Database

Sample Data to Test the Class

How to Download the Update Site Package or Install it With PHP Composer

What is the PHP MySQL Database Class

his class however is simple enough for users to understand what they are doing.

How to Configure the Database Access to Use This Class

The database configuration, which includes database username, password etc is kept in separate file for better security.

Edit config.ini.php to set your database configuration values. For better security, keep this file out of Web document root directory, which in some cases may be public/www . If you change the location of the configuration file, update the path of the file in the database.class.php . By default all files are kept in same directory.

$this->db = parse_ini_file("config.ini.php");

How to Query a Database

How to Setup a Database Connection

Make sure you have edited configuration file with your database details first, then create a new instance of database class.

$db = new MySQLDb;

How to Query a Database

Once new instance of the class is successfully created, it will establish a connection to database. You are now ready to run a SQL query through query method.

$query = "select * from guestbook";
$result = $db->query($query);

To fetch the result set into an array, use fetch() method after running query:

$rows = $db->fetch();
var_dump($rows);

All rows would be returned into $rows array which can be used with any loop to echo.

To get count of returned rows, use $result object's property:

$result->num_rows

Do a var_dump() to see details of returned result object, in case of successful insert, update and delete query $result object returns true, this can be evaluated with simple if/else conditional.

echo ($result) ? "query successful" : "query was not successful";

Select Query

Insert Query

Update Query

Delete Query

Sample Data to Test the Class

CREATE TABLE `guestbook` (
  `id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `user` varchar(20) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `message` varchar(400) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `date` datetime DEFAULT NULL ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=4 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

insert into guestbook (user, message, DATE) values ('me', 'anything', now());
insert into guestbook (user, message, DATE) values ('user', 'a message', now());
insert into guestbook (user, message, DATE) values ('user1', 'new message', now());