If you are operating in a windows environment what you need is a WAMP server. On the other hand if you are in a linux environment, you could use a LAMP server. WAMP stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP. The apache web server will allow you to serve documents on the Internet, allowing server side scripting with PHP and database management with MySQL. It is a one install package , you can install entire package on your server or on your own PC and work with a database from there using PhpMyAdmin.  All of the software is open source.

To begin the installation process go to www.wampserver.com and click on downloads, - Download wampserver2 and this will take you to source forge and download from sourceforge.net to a executable file and  click on run to install then it will ask -

1. do you continue to install ? - click yes.


2. do you accept the license agreement-- Read and if you agree click agree


3. it ask you the folder path - you can give yours or accept the default one, just skip


4. next -Install


5. ask for Firefox as your default browser - say yes - so download Firefox before hand.


6. ask for SMTP server and mail setup - just skip


7. finish installing.

Now you have a local server on your machine, launch it. Look at the system tray on bottom right hand side, there is a WAMP icon, click on that, and again click on PhpMyAdmin. So now you can create database. If you have any data in a spread sheet or in SQL database you can export or import too.

Next step will be to connect to the database - to do this you have to do two steps :

1. you have to create a form - either using HTML markup language and save it as PHP document or using PHP language itself and save it as a PHP document. You link to the document using 'getdata.php' in the "Action" attribute, which is created in the next step.


2. create another document which is named as for example 'getdata.php' using PHP language and SQL queries where you have to write the coding to connect the database. To view the source file please click Here