Anybody Know Anything About MySQL?

Maybe. I'd appreciate that. Ty for your help Jake.

Hi, I am a Mac 10.6.8 user. I am trying to download mySQL. I found this statement on their site:

"Due to very low demand, MySQL has stopped development and support for Mac OS X 10.6, and 10.7. Users are requested to upgrade to recent versions of OS X (10.8+). Source and binaries for previously released versions will continue to be available from the archives."

Does this mean I can't use it? Or does it mean I still can? Thank you.

All they're saying is that newer versions won't be available for OS X 10.6.8. Thus, you'll need to use an older version which is not advisable given that they won't likely get security updates.

cradom, a while back, noted that LibreOffice has a database component that has a UI. Have you checked this out yet?

Ty, I am in the process of checking out this LibreOffice, although I don't know what a UI is. In the meantime, I can't seem to find the older version of SQL compatible with my 10.6.8.

http://www.mysql.com/

Anybody think they can send me the link? Thank you.

I'm going to be pretty brutally honest here. Getting MySQL is very probably a waste of your time. If you don't know what a UI is, there is no way that MySQL is going to be usable by you. Are you familiar with tables, indexing, normalizing, or any of the SQL commands? Have you ever written code? Done algorithms? Flow charts? DB structures? If not, MySQL isn't going to teach you. So why not focus on getting Excel to do what you want, since you seem to know Excel reasonably well. It could take you a year of study to get up to speed on MySQL sufficiently to be able to get close to what you want.

MacInWin said:

I'm going to be pretty brutally honest here. Getting MySQL is very probably a waste of your time. If you don't know what a UI is, there is no way that MySQL is going to be usable by you. Are you familiar with tables, indexing, normalizing, or any of the SQL commands? Have you ever written code? Done algorithms? Flow charts? DB structures? If not, MySQL isn't going to teach you. So why not focus on getting Excel to do what you want, since you seem to know Excel reasonably well. It could take you a year of study to get up to speed on MySQL sufficiently to be able to get close to what you want.

Click to expand...

Ty for your honesty. I really do appreciate it. However, I have a year's time, hopefully a lot more than that too. But whether or not it's a WASTE of a year ... I respectfully don't think that's for you to determine. So if you have the link, I'd appreciate it if you could send it to me and I'll be on my quite possibly naive way, thank you.

A few other things, just for the sake of full disclosure: I do not know what a UI is, but neither do I even know what it stands for (if in fact it is an abbreviation). If I did, I'm sure I could grasp the concept. I am also not familiar with any SQL commands … but I'm sure at some point neither were you. Everyone has to start somewhere! So can I PLEASE have the link for the SQL download compatible with a 10.6.8? Ty.

I don't have any links to legacy MySQL, sorry. Given it seems to be supported by Oracle, legacy versions may not be publicly available. That is how Oracle sometimes works. But you may be disappointed when/if you get it downloaded and installed. I suspect that MySQL will assume users already know relational database design, structure and SQL commands. As for it being a waste, that was an overreach on my part. It's up to you if it's a waste. I'm just trying to say that even if you have a year, don't expect miracles. You may want to look to see if a local community college or university offers courses in relational DB design, implementation, tuning and development. That may be a better way to learn how to use MySQL than just jumping in.

And did you look at the LibreOffice database? I think it was suggested in post#23. That's probably robust enough for what you are trying to achieve.

Honestly, if you're looking into learning SQL, using a SQLite database would be easier to set up and would teach you how to use SQL well enough. SQLiteStudio looks to be ok (I've never used it so I can't actually vouch for it).

Quick question: I just want to make sure I'm on the right track here, but mySQL is both a database, something you download like any other application (like a Microsoft Access just as an example) AND ALSO a programming language (in the vein of HTML or Python or JavaScript), no? Thanks.

mySQL is a database system, you have to create tables indexes, etc., using whatever it uses to build the parts and then use Structured Query Language (SQL) to manipulate the data. Have you read this:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/

That's the user manual for mySQL and tell you what you need to do and how to use it.