I'm a nice guy, but I got to say, RTFM. The code examples in the PHP documentation are VERY good. It is unlikely that anyone here is going to explain it more simply than the PHP documentation.
You did not mention what database you want to use, but lets assume MySQL. Here is a link to PHP's MySQL-related functions.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.mysql.php
From the link above:
[PHP] <?php
// Connecting, selecting database
$link = mysql_connect('mysql_host', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password')
or die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
echo 'Connected successfully';
mysql_select_db('my_database') or die('Could not select database');
// Performing SQL query
$query = 'SELECT * FROM my_table';
$result = mysql_query($query) or die('Query failed: ' . mysql_error());
// Printing results in HTML
echo "<table>\n";
while ($line = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
echo "\t<tr>\n";
foreach ($line as $col_value) {
echo "\t\t<td>$col_value</td>\n";
}
echo "\t</tr>\n";
}
echo "</table>\n";
// Free resultset
mysql_free_result($result);
// Closing connection
mysql_close($link);
?> [/PHP]