Welcome to the part of the book where we start to cover advanced features. The relational system allows users to do more with phpMyAdmin, as we will see in the following chapters. This chapter explains how to install the linked-tables infrastructure, which is a prerequisite for the advanced features, and explains how to define inter-table relations.
When application developers use PHP and MySQL to build web interfaces or other data manipulation applications, they usually establish relations between tables, using the underlying SQL queries—for example, 'get an invoice and all its items' and 'get all books by an author'.
In the first versions of phpMyAdmin, MySQL was storing information about which table belonged to which database, but the relational data structure (how tables relate to each other) was not stored into MySQL. Relations were temporarily made by the applications to generate meaningful results. In other words, the relations were...