The goal of phpMyAdmin is to offer complete web-based management of MySQL servers and data, and to keep up with MySQL and web standards evolution. While the product is not perfect, it currently includes the most commonly requested features and lots of extra features as well.
The development team constantly develops the product based on the reported bugs and requested features, regularly releasing new versions.
phpMyAdmin offers features that cover basic MySQL database and table operations. It also has an internal relational system that maintains metadata to support advanced features. Finally, system administrators can manage users and privileges from phpMyAdmin. It is important to note that phpMyAdmin's choice of available operations depends on the rights the user has on a specific MySQL server.
The basic features consist of:
Database creation, deletion, renaming, and attribute change
Table creation, renaming, copying, and deletion
Table structure maintenance, including indexes
Special table operations (repair, optimization, changing type)
Data insertion, modification, deletion
Data display in horizontal/vertical mode, and Print view
Data navigation and sorting
Binary data uploading
Data search (table or database)
Querying by example (multi-table)
Batch-loading of data (import)
Exporting structure and data in various formats, with compression
Multi-user and multi-server installation with web-based setup
The advanced features include:
Field-level comments
Foreign keys (with or without InnoDB)
Browse foreign table
Bookmarks of queries
Data dictionary
PDF relational schema and dictionary
SQL queries history
Connection to MySQL using either the traditional
mysqlextension or the newmysqliextension (in PHP 5)Character-set support for databases, tables, and fields (with MySQL 4.1)
Column contents transformation based on MIME type
Visual Designer for relations
Support for MySQL 5.0 features: views, procedures, triggers, profiling
Theme management to customize the interface's look
The server administration features consist of:
User and privileges management
Database privileges check
Verify server's runtime information and obtain configuration hints
Full server export