Hello all,

Now before I proceed, please allow me to state my case: I'm very new to PHP, but not so new til I do not know what it is. I do read up on every single documentation/PHP website/manual I can get my hands on, and it's good.

But now I cannot solve one problem only so far, and it is the "mysql_connect" problem. Rest assured I have tried many, many times before I decided to post up my question here.

I am the only "so-called" web designer in my company, so there is no one else to help me. I read the docs, PDF files etc but I cannot even understand the connect part in the first place, which leaves this forum as my last resort to get advice from the real pros.

I have already successfully installed Apache, MySQL Server 5.0, and the basic PHP scripts run fine, so everything should be alright.

It's just that seriously, I cannot understand why when I type :-

<?php
mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "root1") or die(mysql_error());
echo ("Connected to database");
?>

it just doesn't show nor does it give any error. MySQL is running, and the database created runs fine. So I am now wondering what else went wrong?

Is it :-

1. Create database in MySQL using the SQL scripts, then
2. Write the php code to connect to the database?

or did I left out some steps? Please do help a genuine lost PHP newbie. Thanks and regards.

You shouldn't need to set up a database (I mean like 'create database' in MySQL) or tables to connect to a running server. Are you sure your PHP is being executed by your web server? Is your script part of a larger page? Do you get the rest of the page? I'm not sure about how 'lazily' PHP executes code. You don't assign or use the return value from mysql_connect, and some languages don't evaluate functions whose return values aren't used. Maybe instead of die(), try error_log("hello! I'm not working"), and check in your web server's error log for evidence the code executed.

Hi Seanie,

Thank you for your prompt reply. I am still figuring out how to do it, and I will try out your methods. I'm using my local machine as the test server as my company has set all theirs to run only ASP.NET

So far, I've referred to a number of documentations and they just set up the Apache + MySQL server, and jump straight to creating the database and tables itself.

Thanks.

How about your MySQL ODBC driver? Did you installed them?

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