what is a mysql resource exactly

[johnj]

http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.t ... source.php

[johnmacd]

The value that mysql_query returns and stores into $result, it is a MySQL Resource.
Additional PHP functions are required to extract the data from this Resource.
The mysql_fetch_array function takes a MySQL query resource as an argument ($result) and returns the first row of data returned by the mysql_query.