In this final part, we will cover some administrative activities of MySQL and MariaDB. These are activities that are not necessarily related to the development of databases, but are still related to the management of data. Some of these are routine activities and some are only occasionally performed. And we’ll cover some aspects that go beyond MySQL and MariaDB.

First, in Chapter 13, we’ll cover the management of user accounts and their privileges. We covered this briefly at the start of this book, but in this chapter we will discuss it in more depth. We’ll go through how to be more precise about which privileges are given to each user and for which databases and tables.

In Chapter 14, we’ll discuss how to make backups of databases. This is a very important administrative duty. Related to that, we will cover the less routine administrative activity of restoring a backup. When this is needed, it’s usually critical and urgent. You’re always encouraged to complete the exercises at the end of each chapter, but because this chapter covers such an important topic, the exercises here are particularly essential.

Chapter 15 explains the administrative task of importing large amounts of data. The bulk importing of data from another database or from another format (e.g., from a spreadsheet or a text file containing comma-separated values) may not be something you will do often. However, knowing how to do it when needed can be very useful and save you plenty of time and frustration.

The book concludes with Chapter 16, which briefly covers a few APIs. These include examples for connecting and querying MySQL and MariaDB with PHP and a few other programming languages. Almost all databases are interfaced with an API, as it allows for greater control and security−and doesn’t require users to know anything about using a database.