We now need some way to interact with the database. We need to define tables and retrieve, add, update or delete data.

SQL (Structured Query Language) is a computer language used to express database operations for data organized in a relational form (e.g., in tables).

SQL is the industry standard language that most database programmers speak, and it is used by most relational database management system (RDBMS) packages.

As its name indicates, MySQL is a database engine. Due to its simplicity, however, it only supports a subset of the current SQL standard.