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There are a couple of key advantages to the client-server architecture DBMS. Firstly, there is no need for the client to be running on the same computer system as the server. Firstly, requests can be sent by the client over a network or internet connections to the server on a remote host. The fact that the server resides on a remote computer is invisible to the client user. This makes the database available to greater numbers of users than a shared-file DBMS offers. In large scale enterprise environments this also allows high levels of fault tolerance and load balancing to be implemented.
Secondly, separating the client from the server allows a wider range of client types to be used to access the database. Valid clients can be the MySQL tools (see [[Introducing the MySQL Tools]]), applications written in other programming languages such as C, C++ or Java, or web based applications developed using languages such as [[PHP Essentials|PHP]] or JSP).
Whilst the advantages of the client-server architecture are clear, it is important to appreciate that there is nothing to prevent both the client and server from running on the same physical computer. The majority of this book will assume that the reader is running both the MySQL client and server components on the same computer system.
