Book excerpt: MySQL’s popularity has brought a flood of questions about how to solve specific problems, and that’s where this cookbook is essential. When you need quick solutions or techniques, this handy resource provides scores of short, focused pieces of code, hundreds of worked-out examples, and clear, concise explanations for programmers who don’t have the time (or expertise) to solve MySQL problems from scratch. Ideal for beginners and professional database and web developers, this updated third edition covers powerful features in MySQL 5.6 (and some in 5.7). The book focuses on programming APIs in Python, PHP, Java, Perl, and Ruby. With more than 200+ recipes, you’ll learn how to: Use the mysql client and write MySQL-based programs Create, populate, and select data from tables Store, retrieve, and manipulate strings Work with dates and times Sort query results and generate summaries Use stored routines, triggers, and scheduled events Import, export, validate, and reformat data Perform transactions and work with statistics Process web input, and generate web content from query results Use MySQL-based web session management Provide security and server administration