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

Character sets and collations


A character set describes how symbols for a specific language or dialect are encoded. A collation contains rules to compare and sort the characters of a character set. The character set used to store our data may be different from the one used to display it, leading to data discrepancies. Thus, a need to transform the data arises.

Since MySQL 4.1.x, the MySQL server does the character recoding work for us. Also, MySQL enables us to indicate the character set and collation for each database, each table, and even each field. A default character set for a database applies to each of its tables, unless it is overridden at the table level. The same principle applies to every column.

Effective character sets and collations

On the home page, we can see the MySQL charset information and a MySQL connection collation selector. Here is the MySQL charset information:

The character set information (as seen here after MySQL charset) is used to generate HTML information, which...