What are the best practices for handling resources returned by mysql_query in PHP?

When using mysql_query in PHP to execute SQL queries, it is important to handle the resources returned properly to avoid memory leaks and improve performance. The best practice is to always free the resources by calling mysql_free_result after fetching the data from the result set. This ensures that the memory allocated for the result set is released and the connection to the database is not kept open unnecessarily.

// Execute SQL query
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM table");

// Fetch data from result set
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    // Process data
}

// Free the result set
mysql_free_result($result);

// Close the database connection
mysql_close($connection);