[SC.LUG] MySQL frustration

[Simeon Farrington]

Hi all

I've been having a very entertaining week (ok, the brakes went on my car 
whilst driving down a hill while going on holiday and hence I'm now 
stranded!) learning php-MySQL within websites. I happily worked through 
my dreamweaver book which set up the database for the purposes needed 
and websites duly worked. I will point out at this stage that as I'm 
playing with dreamweaver, I've got everything set up on a windows box. 
However, as we're talking about mysql syntax here, I don't think this 
will matter in this instance. Ultimately the plan is to move the 
databases to the ISPs server and run things from there while I sort out 
local servers etc.

Now I have a problem. I'm trying to create my own database and populate 
it with data. This is surely a doddle to do, but at the moment I think 
my chances of obtaining a cure for cancer or developing a working 
procedure for time-travel are greater than getting this to work!

The set up is this. I have a table of data (called towers.csv) in text 
(comma delimited) format which I wish to load into my table.

The table appears to be set up as expected (in that each of the column 
names can be located by dreamweaver), but I cannot fathom how to get my 
data (in bulk) to be appended to this table. On the one occasion it 
looked like it might of worked, I wrote a test page of php-mysql 
requests to access the data, but all I had returned was blanks! I don't 
know what went wrong.

I have tried doing

mysql> LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE 'E:\\towers.csv' INTO TABLE `towers` ;
Query OK, 100 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Records: 101  Deleted: 0  Skipped: 1  Warnings: 808

No information about the warnings, but clearly they are an issue given 
my data isn't picked up when requested. The format of the data in the 
input file was (first row column titles, second row is the first record 
of the table):

ID,Day,Branch,Tower,Bells,Note,Sundayam,Evensong
1,Monday,Chester,Chester Cathederal,12,0,0,0

So the questions are (so far):

1) How does one simply get bulk data into MySQL - I don't really want to 
append each row line by line using mysql, although the time spent on 
this exercise to now probably would have covered most of such a 
laborious task.
2) Having (supposedly) got the data in, is there any simple way of 
viewing the data? Previously at work I've used M$ Access where you can 
at least view tables of data so you can see whether the dataitems have 
gone to the right places etc. If I could do this then at least I'd know 
where the data had gone!!!!!

WHat is really getting to me at the moment is that the documentation 
merrily hurtles off into the stratosphere, yet a simple section on the 
basics isn't forthcoming :(

So if anyone can help, PLEEEEEASE!!! If you need more information, let 
me know

Thanks

Simeon