Book Image

Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management

Book Image

Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management

Overview of this book

phpmyAdmin is one of the most widely used open source applications, which is written in PHP. phpMyAdmin supports a wide range of operations with MySQL. Currently, it can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields, manage privileges, export data into various formats and is available in 52 languages.phpMyAdmin is a web-based front-end to manage MySQL databases and has been adopted by a number of Open-Source distributors.Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management is an easy-to-read, step-by-step practical guide that walks you through every facet of this legendary toolóphpMyAdminóand takes you a step ahead in taking full advantage of its potential. This book is filled with illustrative examples that will help you understand every phpMyAdmin feature in detail.This is the official guide to this popular MySQL web interface. It starts with installing and configuring phpMyAdmin, including the phpMyAdmin Configuration Storage, which is the key to its advanced features. This is followed by configuring authentication in phpMyAdmin and setting parameters that influence the interface as a whole.You will also learn some advanced features such as defining inter-table relations with the advanced Designer module. You will practice synchronizing databases on different servers and managing MySQL replication to improve performance and data security. Moreover, you will also store queries as bookmarks for their quick retrieval.In addition to it, this book helps you to learn new features introduced in version 3.4.x such as users' preferences, producing charts and the visual multi-table query builder.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using information_schema


In the SQL:2003 Standard, access to the data dictionary (or database metadata) is provided by a structure called information_schema. As this is part of the Standard, and already exists in other database systems, the decision to implement this feature into MySQL was a very good one.

Note

MySQL has added some information that is not part of the standard, for example, INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS.COLUMN_TYPE. Be aware of the fact that if you use this information in a software project, it might not be portable to other SQL implementations.

A phpMyAdmin user sees the information_schema as a normal database containing views. These views describe many aspects of the structure of the databases hosted on this server. The following screenshot shows a subset of what can be seen (and in fact, the only possible operation on this database is SELECT):

Internally, phpMyAdmin can call the information_schema, instead of the corresponding SHOW statements to retrieve metadata. This behavior...