Databases

An Introducation

What is a database?

A database is a collection of information that is organized so that it can easily be accessed, managed, and updated.

This is NOT a database class, so we will ignore most things, but from an Systems Administration perspective, knowing how to install, configure, and manage a database is important. Rather, being able to do these to a DBMS is important.

What is a DBMS?

• Database Management System.
  • Allows us to manage a collection of databases
  • Also consists of access controls, user information, and database metadata

DBMS Notes

• Users are independent of system users
  • DBMS has own set of users and passwords
• Users are identified by username AND hostname
  • joe@localhost and joe@www.thegummibear.com are two different users
• Access controls are given on a per-database / per-user instance
• User and access control management are administrative actions (the kind we care about)

A few random terms

• Database
  • A collection of tables
• Table
  • A collection of rows and columns (in db lingo, these are records and fields respectively)

DBMS Actions we care about

• User management
  • add, modify, delete
• Database management
  • add, delete databases
• Permissions or user account controls for a database

Non-administrative actions (we only moderately care about)

• Create, Modify, Delete tables
• Add, update, delete records of a table
• Retrieve information from a table
• With RDBMS, these are usually performed using SQL.

DBMS commands we really care about

• To add a user
  • create user 'fred'@'localhost' identified with mysql_native_password by 'SecretPass123?'.
• To remove a user:
  • drop user 'fred'@'localhost';
• Grant permissions
  • grant all privileges on sampledb.* to 'fred'@'localhost';
  • this is the most common grant statement, but instead of all, you could grant one or all of select, insert, update, delete (and more).
• Revoke permissions
  • revoke all privileges on sampledb.* from 'fred'@'localhost';

DBMS commands we kind of care about

• Select a database to perform operations on
  • use mysql;
  • use sampledb;
• See permissions for a user (after you have selected the mysql db)
  • select User,Host,Db from db;
• See users that you have created
  • select User,Host from user;

DBMS commands we don’t really care about but we need to be able to do in order to test our permissions

• Create a database
  • create database testdb
• Use it
  • use testdb
• Show tables in the db
  • show tables;
• Create a new table (this can be very complex, take the database class for this)
  • create table numbers (x INT);
  • Creates a table called numbers with a single field named x which is designed to store an integer.
  • create table garbage (name VARCHAR(10), age INT);
  • Creates a table named garbage with 2 fields, name and age. Other than that, it is beyond our course.

DBMS commands we don’t really care about but we need to be able to do in order to test our permissions

• Delete a table
  • drop table numbers
• Insert record (row) into table
  • insert into numbers values (10);
  • insert into garbage VALUES ('tommy', 30);
• Delete a record
  • delete from garbage where name='tommy';
  • You probably don’t really need to know this one.
• Get info from a table
  • Select * from numbers
  • Shows all the records from the numbers table

RDBMS Install (Server)

• Install mysql-server package
• Install mysql-client package
• Remove unwanted users and database
• Enable remote connections
• Manage users and databases

RDBMS Install (Client)

A client may want to access a database. I.e. a web server may want to load dynamic content from a database onto a website.

Steps:

• connect to db server socket (3306?)
• authenticate with user/pass
• choose db to use
• manipulate tables of db (or read data)
• I usually install the mysql-tools package to test connectivity

Last Updated 07/27/2023