The best way to understand what a database is, is to make an example of setting up and administrate a database.
Your database will be created using a special application provided with Apache-MySQL-PHP (XAMPP) installation. This application is named phpMyAdmin and it is a PHP scripts package. PhpMyAdmin helps you to manage databases. It allows you to create and access databases and to create, modify, add and delete tables and fields in your databases. It will also allow you to backup and restore databases, plus perform simple and complex queries. PhpMyAdmin is the most web-based popular interface for MySQL database administration. It looks like a web site and you can to access it from the URL http://localhost/xampp/, (see fig. 1.1.)