When I first wanted to use a database, everything I read seemed to start at Step 2 - always assuming that somehow I had installed the necessary brain parts that made Step 1 something I must already know. Not so!! Purposely, this tutorial assumes the reader knows nothing about web databases other than a desire to use them. And it assumes that your web host supports php and MySQL.

What is a database?

No doubt that the purists will dispute the definition below, but this is a starter tutorial so it's going to be sufficient for our tutorial purposes. A database is a collection of information, some related, some unrelated, that exists in a series of tables (containing related information), each of which has a number or rows, each of which has a number of columns, and each of those table cells contains a single piece of information. Within a table, information in the same row 'belongs together' and information in the same column is the same 'type' of information:

Enough

For this tutorial, we'll create a database called members and add a table to it called details - similar to the table shown above. Let's get to the real database stuff.

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