Specifications

• BDB. These tables are transaction safe; that is, they provide COMMIT and ROLLBACK capabil-

ities. They are slower to use than the MyISAM tables, and are based on the Berkeley DB.

At the time of writing, these were still being debugged in MySQL version 3.23.21, and

will require an extra download in order to be used, available from the MySQL Web site.

These additional table types can be useful when you are striving for extra speed or transac-

tional safety.

Loading Data from a File

One useful feature of MySQL that we have not yet discussed is the LOAD DATA INFILE state-

ment. This can be used to load table data in from a file. It executes very quickly.

This is a flexible command with many options, but typical usage is something like the follow-

ing:

LOAD DATA INFILE “newbooks.txt” INTO TABLE books;

This will read row data from the file newbooks.txt into the table books. By default, data fields

in the file must be separated by tabs and enclosed in single quotes, and each row must be sepa-

rated by a newline (\n). Special characters must be escaped out with a slash (\). All these char-

acteristics are configurable with the various options of the LOAD statement—see the MySQL

manual for more details.

To use the LOAD DATA INFILE statement, a user must have the FILE privilege discussed earlier.