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

Securing phpMyAdmin


Security can be examined at the following various levels:

  • How we can protect the phpMyAdmin installation directory

  • Which workstations can access phpMyAdmin

  • The databases that a legitimate user can see

Protecting phpMyAdmin at directory level

Suppose an unauthorized person is trying to use our copy of phpMyAdmin. If we use the simple config authentication type, anyone knowing the URL of our phpMyAdmin will have the same effective rights to our data as we do. In this case, we should use the directory protection mechanism offered by our web server (for example, .htaccess, a file name with a leading dot) to add a level of protection. More details are available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication.

If we decide on using http or cookie authentication types, our data would be safe enough. However, we should take normal precautions with our password (including its periodic change).

The directory where phpMyAdmin is installed contains sensitive data. Not only the...