PHP and MySQL Web Development 4th Ed-tqw-_darksiderg

218 Chapter 8 Designing Your Web Database
The process is basically the same regardless of which scripting engine or database server
you use. Often the web server software, PHP engine, and database server all run on the
same machine. However, it is also quite common for the database server to run on a different
machine.You might do this for reasons of security, increased capacity, or load
spreading. From a development perspective, this approach is much the same to work
with, but it might offer some significant advantages in performance.
As your applications increase in size and complexity, you will begin to separate your
PHP applications into tiers—typically, a database layer that interfaces to MySQL, a business
logic layer that contains the core of the application, and a presentation layer that
manages the HTML output. However, the basic architecture shown in Figure 8.9 still
holds; you just add more structure to the PHP section.
Further Reading
In this chapter, we covered some guidelines for relational database design. If you want to
delve into the theory behind relational databases, you can try reading books by some of
the relational gurus such as C.J. Date. Be warned, however, that the material can be comparatively
theoretical and might not be immediately relevant to a commercial web developer.The
average web database tends not to be that complicated.
Next
In the next chapter, you start setting up your MySQL database. First, you learn how to
set up a MySQL database for the web, how to query it, and then how to query it
from PHP.