MySQL 5.7 Reference Manual Including MySQL NDB Cluster 7.5 and NDB Cluster 7.6

Chapter 19 Using MySQL as a Document Store

This chapter introduces an alternative way of working with MySQL as a document store, sometimes referred to as using NoSQL. If your intention is to use MySQL in a traditional (SQL) way, this chapter is probably not relevant to you.

Important

MySQL Shell 8.0 is the most recent version and is highly recommended for use with MySQL Server 5.7. Please upgrade to MySQL Shell 8.0. If you have not yet installed MySQL Shell, download it from the download site. See the MySQL Shell 8.0 documentation for the latest documentation. This chapter covers configuring MySQL 5.7 server as a document store and is compatible with version 8.0 clients such as MySQL Shell and MySQL Connectors.

Relational databases such as MySQL usually required a document schema to be defined before documents can be stored. The features described in this section enable you to use MySQL as a document store, which is a schema-less, and therefore schema-flexible, storage system for documents. When using MySQL as a document store, to create documents describing products you do not need to know and define all possible attributes of any products before storing them and operating with them. This differs from working with a relational database and storing products in a table, when all columns of the table must be known and defined before adding any products to the database. The features described in this chapter enable you to choose how you configure MySQL, using only the document store model, or combining the flexibility of the document store model with the power of the relational model.

These sections cover the usage of MySQL as a document store: