Delisle - phpMyAdmin Starter

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Welcome to the phpMyAdmin Starter. This book has been especially created to provide you with all the information that you need to get set up with phpMyAdmin. You will learn the basics of phpMyAdmin, get started with creating your own tables, and discover some tips and tricks for using phpMyAdmin.

This document contains the following sections:

So what is phpMyAdmin? find out what phpMyAdmin actually is, what you can do with it, and why its so great.

Installation learn how to download and install phpMyAdmin with the minimum fuss and then set it up so that you can use it as soon as possible.

Quick start this section will show you how to perform one of the core tasks of phpMyAdmin, creating tables. Follow the steps to create your own tables, which will be the basis of most of your work in phpMyAdmin.

Top features you need to know about here you will learn how to perform five tasks with the most important features in phpMyAdmin. By the end of this section you will be able to browse, search, and change data, and create relations.

People and places you should get to know every Open Source project is centered around a community. This section provides you with many useful links to the project page and forums, as well as a number of helpful articles, tutorials, blogs, and the Twitter feeds of phpMyAdmin super-contributors.

Chapter 1. phpMyAdmin Starter

So, what is phpMyAdmin?

phpMyAdmin is a PHP application that provides a complete interface to manage MySQL databases over the Web. The following image depicts the product's home page; the main sections MySQL and Web server indicate that phpMyAdmin relies on a PHP-enabled web server to send commands to a MySQL server and receive data from the server:

As MySQL is the database of choice on the Web and PHP is a popular web scripting language, web host providers often provide phpMyAdmin for their users as the de facto mechanism to administrate their databases.

Typical users

Users of phpMyAdmin can be broken down into these categories:

• Web developers
• Database administrators
• IT students and teachers

The authors of other web applications often advise administrators to use phpMyAdmin, either for initially populating the required database, or as a back entry in case they are locked down from their application.

Available functions

phpMyAdmin offers panels to manage the structure of data: creating, editing, deleting various elements like databases, tables, columns, indexes, views, and foreign keys (relations). The software also enables you to deal with the data itself: inserting, editing, and deleting data; sorting; searching in tables or databases; importing and exporting to various file formats.

A system administrator can also use phpMyAdmin to acquire status information about the MySQL server; this information can be used to fine-tune the server. Moreover, maintenance of MySQL usernames and privileges is available.

Advanced functions include:

• Generating system documentation, including table relations in graphical form
• Transforming data (for example to show a thumbnail of an image stored as a BLOB(Binary Large Object) ; see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/blob.html)
• Tracking changes on structure and data
• Keeping bookmarks of frequently-used queries
• Maintaining users' preferences about phpMyAdmin's settings
• Synchronizing databases between servers

Volunteers all over the world help the development team by providing translations for the interface in many languages.

Installation

In four easy steps, you can install phpMyAdmin and get it set up on your system.

Step 1What do I need?

Before you install phpMyAdmin, you will need to check that you have all of the required elements, as listed below:

• phpMyAdmin requires a web server environment that supports PHP, for example Apache (http://httpd.apache.org/) or IIS (http://www.iis.net/).
• 25MB free (minimum) disk space on the web server. You will require more free space to store your data in MySQL.
• phpMyAdmin is written in the PHP scripting language. phpMyAdmin v 3.4.x requires a minimum of PHP v5.2.0.0 to run.
• The minimum supported MySQL version is 5.0.x.
• You need MySQL account information (username, password)

Step 2Downloading phpMyAdmin

The recommended way to download phpMyAdmin is as a compressed package from http://phpmyadmin.net/. We suggest that you download the most current stable build.