The following font conventions are used throughout the book:

Commands often are shown with a prompt to illustrate the context in which they are used. Commands that you issue from the command line are shown with a % prompt:

%chmod 600 my.cnf

That prompt is one that Unix users are used to seeing, but it doesn’t necessarily signify that a command will work only under Unix. Unless indicated otherwise, commands shown with a % prompt generally should work under Windows, too.

If you should run a command under Unix as the root user, the prompt is # instead:

#perl -MCPAN -e shell

Commands that are specific only to Windows use the C:> prompt:

C:>"C:Program FilesMySQLMySQL Server 5.0inmysql"

SQL statements that are issued from within the mysql client program are shown with a mysql> prompt and terminated with a semicolon:

mysql>SELECT * FROM my_table;

For examples that show a query result as you would see it when using mysql, I sometimes truncate the output, using an ellipsis (...) to indicate that the result consists of more rows than are shown. The following query produces many rows of output, of which those in the middle have been omitted:

mysql>SELECT name, abbrev FROM states ORDER BY name;
+----------------+--------+
| name           | abbrev |
+----------------+--------+
| Alabama        | AL     |
| Alaska         | AK     |
| Arizona        | AZ     |
...
| West Virginia  | WV     |
| Wisconsin      | WI     |
| Wyoming        | WY     |
+----------------+--------+

Examples that show only the syntax for SQL statements do not include the mysql> prompt, but they do include semicolons as necessary to make it clearer where statements end. For example, this is a single statement:

CREATE TABLE t1 (i INT)
SELECT * FROM t2;

But this example represents two statements:

CREATE TABLE t1 (i INT);
SELECT * FROM t2;

The semicolon is a notational convenience used within mysql as a statement terminator. But it is not part of SQL itself, so when you issue SQL statements from within programs that you write (for example, using Perl or Java), you should not include terminating semicolons.