After installing and configuring MySQL 8.0.30, I installed the Apache Web Server, PHP and the MySQLi packages. Here are the step-by-step instructions after installing and configuring the MySQL Server and provisioning a student user and the sakila and studentdb databases (blog for those steps). After installing the major components, I completed the HTTPS configuration steps for Apache 2.

The installation steps are:

1. Install the Apache packages as the sudoer user with this command:

   sudo dnf install -y httpd
   

2. Enable Apache as the sudoer user with this command:

   chkconfig httpd on
   

   This returns the following completion message:

   Note: Forwarding request to 'systemctl enable httpd.service'.
   Created symlink …

 Help!

I am preparing a presentation for the Longhorn PHP conference titled PHP & MySQL -- How do PDO, MySQLi, and X DevAPI do what they do.  This will be a comparison of using PHP with different MySQL Connectors.  As far as I can tell there are no three way comparisons of mysqli, PDO, and the X DevAPI PECL extension.  And much of the PDO versus myqli stuff looks to me like it has not aged well. 

I have good material in the raw presentation about overall features, parameters for prepared queries. And a good section on the how's and whys on prepared queries.  

But what else would you like to see in such a presentation?  I have read some postings on the web about turning off buffering (fairly simple to do).  But what else are would you like to see compared?

…

My students liked the MySQL Transaction post but wanted one that showed how an external web application would interact with MySQL in the scope of a transaction. So, I put a little PHP function together that write across two related tables in the context of a transaction. It uses mysqli (MySQL Improved Extension) to connect PHP to the MySQL database.

The function is barebones and uses the oldest approach of hidden inputs to maintain context between rendered forms using an HTML POST method. The hidden inputs are preceded with “h_” and snake case is used for variable names.

The function only writes to two tables. It writes to the member table and when that completes successfully to the contact table. The function:

• Submits credentials from a file and raises an error when they don’t work.
• Initializes a …

MySQL will be used for our online sections because the VMware instance and Docker configurations where too large to effectively download this term.

MySQL 8.0.21 Installation Steps

After you download the MySQL 8 MSI file, you will perform the following 24 steps to install MySQL on Windows 10. If you want a full developer install you must install Microsoft Excel and Visual Studio first.

1. The first thing you need to do is grant privileges to allow the MySQL Installer application to work in Windows 10. Click the Yes button to authorize the MySQL Installer to run.

1. The next thing you need to do is grant privileges to allow …

Six years ago I wrote a common lookup post to illustrate the effectiveness of things used throughout your applications. Now, I’m updating my student image with a more complete solution to show how to avoid update anomalies.

In the prior post, I used a while loop in PHP, like the following:

do {
      ...
} while($stmt->next_result());

Using PHP Version 7.3.8 and MySQL 8.0.16, that now raises the following error message:

Strict Standards: mysqli_stmt::next_result(): There is no next result set. Please, call mysqli_stmt_more_results()/mysqli_stmt::more_results() to check whether to call this function/method in /var/www/html/app/library.inc on line 81

You can see this type of error when you set the following parameters in your file during testing:

ini_set('display_errors',1); …

Somebody didn’t like the MySQLi Update Query example on the tutorialspoint.com website because it use the procedure mysqli_query style. Here’s a simple example of using the object-oriented method version. More or less, instead of query it uses the more intuitive execute() method.

The update_member function contains the logic and below it is a call to the test the function. It relies on a MySQLCredentials.inc file that contains the hostname, user name, password, and database name. You can create create member table, like my example in MySQL 8, or any other table in your MySQL database.

<?php /*
||  Function Name: update_member
*/
function update_member($account_number, $member_type, …

Since PHP 7.0 has been released there's more attention on scalar types. Keeping types for data from within your application is relatively simple. But when talking to external systems, like a database things aren't always as one eventually might initially expect.

For MySQL the type we see -- in the first approximation -- is defined by the network protocol. The MySQL network protocol by default converts all data into strings. So if we fetch an integer from the database and use PHP 7's typing feature we get an error:

<?php
declare(strict_types=1);

function getInteger() : int {
  $mysqli = new mysqli(...);
  return $mysqli->query("SELECT 1")->fetch_row()[0];
}

var_dump(getInteger());
?>

Fatal error: Uncaught TypeError: Return value of getInteger() must be of the type integer, string returned in t.php:6

Of course the solution is easy: Either we cast ourselves or we disable the strict mode and PHP will …

I posted earlier in the year how to configure a Fedora instance to test PHP code on a local VM. However, I’ve got a few questions on how to find those posts. Here’s a consolidation with links on those steps:

1. Go to this blog post and install the httpd and php libraries with the yum installer.
2. In the same blog post as step 1 (you can put the sample PHP code into the /var/www/html directory for testing), connect to the yum shell and remove the php-mysql library and then install the mysqlnd library.
3. Go to this blog …

Everything seemed complete after configuring my standalone MySQL instance to a LAMP installation, but last night I started playing with the image files. It turns out that I failed to install the php-gd library.

There’s very little feedback when you try to troubleshoot why you can’t read an image. In fact, the error message for reading the BLOB from MySQL was only available on the local Firefox browser:

      The image "http://localhost/ConvertMySQLBlobToImage.php" cannot be displayed because it contains errors.

The fix requires root to install the php-gd library with the yum utility:

yum install php-gd

You’ll need to answer …

My students wanted an extra credit assignment, so I thought a LAMP configuration and test would be appropriate. The only problem was I hadn’t added it to their course VMware instance. So, here are the instructions to install Apache2, PHP, and MySQLi for a complete LAMP stack when MySQL is already installed.

The post builds on my Fedora Install of MySQL and MySQL Workbench on Fedora posts from last year. It also presumes that you’ve installed a studentdb database but you need to know how to do that let me know (but it hasn’t changed much from the example at the bottom of this old MySQL 5.1 blog post).

You …