Book Image

Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.3.x for Effective MySQL Management

Book Image

Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.3.x for Effective MySQL Management

Overview of this book

phpMyAdmin is an open source tool written in PHP to handle MySQL administration over the World Wide Web. It can execute SQL statements and manage users and their permissions. However, when it comes to exploiting phpMyAdmin to its full potential, even experienced developers and system administrators are left baffled.Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.3.x for Effective MySQL Management is an easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide that walks you through every facet of this efficient tool. Author Marc Delisle draws on his experience as one of the leading developers and project administrator of phpMyAdmin and uses his unique tutorial approach to take full advantage of its potential. This book is filled with illustrative examples that will help you understand every phpMyAdmin feature in detail.The book helps you get started with installing and configuring phpMyAdmin and looks at its features. You then work on a sample project with two basic tables and perform basic actions such as creating, editing, and deleting data, tables, and databases. You will learn how to create up-to-date backups and import the data that you have exported. You will then explore different search mechanisms and options for querying across multiple tables.The book gradually proceeds to advanced features such as defining inter-table relations and installing the linked-tables infrastructure. Some queries are out of the scope of the interface and this book will show you how to accomplish these tasks with SQL commands.New features of version 3.3.x, such as synchronizing databases on different servers and managing MySQL replication to improve performance and data security, are covered in this book. Towards the end of the book you will learn to document your database, track changes made to the database, and manage user accounts using phpMyAdmin server management features.This book is an upgrade from the previous version that covered phpMyAdmin Version 3.1. Version 3.3.x introduced features such as new import and export modules, tracking changes, synchronizing structure and data between servers, and providing support for replication.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.3.x for Effective MySQL Management
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

The SQL query box


phpMyAdmin allows us to accomplish many database operations via its graphical interface. However, there will be times when we have to rely on SQL query input to achieve operations that are not directly supported by the interface. Here are two examples of such queries:

SELECT department, AVG(salary) FROM employees GROUP BY department HAVING years_experience > 10;
SELECT FROM_DAYS(TO_DAYS(CURDATE()) +30);

To enter such queries, the SQL query box is available from a number of places within phpMyAdmin.

The Database view

We encounter our first SQL query box when going to the SQL menu available in the Database view.

This box is simple we type in a valid (hopefully) MySQL statement and click on Go. Under the query text area, there are bookmark-related choices (explained later in Chapter 14, Using Bookmarks). Usually, we don't have to change the standard SQL delimiter, which is a semicolon. However, there is a Delimiter dialog in case we need it (see Chapter 17,

For a default...