Hi DBA's and Programmers of all sorts - Indulge a new learner. I administrate a database for a living, but I don't quite understand how it works. So I understand the concept of relational databases. What confuses me is this: what is the process (general/conceptual - i dont need a detailed tutorial since i'm just curious) between creating tables for a database and having a live fully functionally SQL database on your server for use on a site? Thanks for the info!
Nice to see you're curious Designing of databases (for me personally) comes a lot from experience and generally just from my gut about what to expect in the future. ie: will they want to add more fields about the user, will they add coupon codes etc? I started out much like you, in just learning theory. Then I tried to dissect other databases (wordpress and ModX) and see how they worked. When I got around to designing my own I tried to follow the normalization process as much as possible. In the real world however you start to realise that going past the third normal form (a stage in normalization) is usually impractical and takes up too much time. To get started I'd suggest MySQL with phpMyAdmin. MySQL is the actual database engine and data, phpMyAdmin is just a nice interface to it that you can access from anywhere. The MySQL client is great for learning, but MySQL listens on port 3306 - and for security it's blocked from outside connections a lot of the time.