First you open a connection to the database and pass it any necessary credentials. Once you have a connection object, you use the mysql APIs to encode the necessary SQL to insert your data into the database. Keep in mind that it may be more efficient to simply store the relative file paths in the database, and leave the files somewhere unmolested on the file system. If you truly need the entire file uploaded into the database, make sure you are putting it into a BLOB or TEXT field.