I guess I should be offering an explanation as to why >>2 is correct, so here it goes.

MySQL is a database thing. It's written in C and it offers an API (in C), that you use to store and retrieve data. It's pretty damn fast, faster than anything you or some other individual alone would be able to implement. So, other languages make use of this API by integrating the C functions et cetera to their interface. Since there's more work to be done in runtime, using functions from those languages is going to be a tad slower, but not enough to be noticable in a small/medium scale project.

You'll find the C api documentation here,
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/6.0/en/c.html

As for PHP, you already know this I hope, but here's the docs
http://php.net/manual/en/book.mysql.php