Now that we have the MySQL server running, it is time to load up the MySQL console client. This is done the same way that we loaded it before (i.e., run the mysql.exe executable that is located in the c:\mysql\bin\ directory). In SQL, there are two types of statements that we can execute. These are DDL (Data Definition Language) and DML (Data Manipulation Language). DDL is used to affect the structure of the database (i.e., add databases, add tables, etc.), whereas DML is used to add and modify data in an existing database and also retrieve information.

First we will look at the DDL language, as we require a database to work with before we can manipulate any data within it.