MySQL, MariaDB and MS SQL can return results in different forms. Depending on what language we are using and what we are doing, we can and may need to access them in different ways. In this post we are going to explore this and go over a simple example using MySQL or MariaDB and PHP. This same thing happens in other SQL servers as well as being found in in other languages other than PHP. I have a post on doing this with ColdFusion and accessing different returned data, but that is also a bit more complicated. We are going to try to keep this example simple and mostly relating to MySQL and MariaDB instead of PHP, though other languages have the same thing going.