PHP Create a MySQL Database

A database consists of one or more tables.

You will need special CREATE privileges to create or to delete a MySQL database.

Create a MySQL Database Using MySQLi and PDO

The CREATE DATABASE statement is used to create a database in MySQL.

The following examples create a database named "myDB":

Example (MySQLi Object-oriented)

< ?php
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";

// Create connection
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password);
// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
  die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
} 

// Create database
$sql = "CREATE DATABASE myDB";
if ($conn->query($sql) === TRUE) {
  echo "Database created successfully";
} else {
  echo "Error creating database: " . $conn->error;
}

$conn->close();
?>

Note: When you create a new database, you must only specify the first three arguments to the mysqli object (servername, username and password).

Tip: If you have to use a specific port, add an empty string for the database-name argument, like this: new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "", port)

Example (MySQLi Procedural)

< ?php
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";

// Create connection
$conn = mysqli_connect($servername, $username, $password);
// Check connection
if (!$conn) {
  die("Connection failed: " . mysqli_connect_error());
}

// Create database
$sql = "CREATE DATABASE myDB";
if (mysqli_query($conn, $sql)) {
  echo "Database created successfully";
} else {
  echo "Error creating database: " . mysqli_error($conn);
}

mysqli_close($conn);
?>

Note: The following PDO example create a database named "myDBPDO":

Example (PDO)

< ?php
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";

try {
  $conn = new PDO("mysql:host=$servername", $username, $password);
  // set the PDO error mode to exception
  $conn->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
  $sql = "CREATE DATABASE myDBPDO";
  // use exec() because no results are returned
  $conn->exec($sql);
  echo "Database created successfully< br>";
} catch(PDOException $e) {
  echo $sql . "< br>" . $e->getMessage();
}

$conn = null;
?>

Tip: A great benefit of PDO is that it has exception class to handle any problems that may occur in our database queries. If an exception is thrown within the try{ } block, the script stops executing and flows directly to the first catch(){ } block. In the catch block above we echo the SQL statement and the generated error message.