While developing my Joomla sites I've recently experienced some difficulty connecting to MySQL with PHP.  The solution is rather simple and I'm sure there's a very good explanation that I need to understand (Likely to follow in another tutorial).

If you as a SQL database developer have built and deployed your projects and then maintained the changes to them over time, you will know how difficult it is to successfully keep track of the changes.  There is so much to keep tabs on, like index changes, data type changes and even updating schema like triggers.  Thankfully there is software out there to do the job!