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

Seeking support


The starting point for support is the phpMyAdmin official site, http://phpmyadmin.net, which has sections on documentation and support. There you will find links to the discussion forums and to various trackers, such as:

  • Bug tracker

  • Feature requests tracker

  • Translations tracker

  • Patches tracker

  • Support tracker

FAQs

The Documentation.html file, which is part of the product, contains a lengthy FAQ section with numbered questions and answers. It is recommended to peruse this FAQ section as the first source for help.

Help forums

The development team recommends that you use the product's forums to search for the problem encountered, and then start a new forum discussion before opening a bug report.

Creating a SourceForge account

Creating a (free) SourceForge user account and using it for posting on forums is highly recommended. This enables better tracking of questions and answers.

Choosing the thread title

It is important to choose the summary title carefully when you start a new forum thread. Titles like "Help me!", "Help a newbie!", "Problem", or "phpMyAdmin error!" are difficult to deal with, as the answers are threaded to these titles and further reference becomes problematic. Better titles that have been used in the help forum include:

  • "Import with UploadDir"

  • "User can't but root can login"

  • "How big can I expect a table to get"

  • "Continuous login prompts"

  • "Cannot add foreign key"

Reading the answers

As people will read and, almost always answer, your question, giving feedback in the forum about the answers can really help the person who answered, and also help others who have the same problem.

Using the support tracker

The support tracker is another place to ask for support. Also, if we have submitted a bug report, which is in fact a support request, the report will be moved to the support tracker. If you have a SourceForge user account with e-mail forwarding configured in your profile, you will be notified of this tracker change.

Using the bug tracker

In this tracker, we see bugs that have not yet been fixed, along with the bugs that have been fixed for the next version. Bugs fixed for the next version keep a status of "open" to avoid getting duplicate bug reports, but their priority level is lowered.

Environment description

As developers will try to reproduce the problem mentioned, it helps to describe your environment. This description can be short, but should contain the following items:

  • phpMyAdmin version (the team, however, expects that it's the current stable version)

  • Web server name and version

  • PHP version

  • MySQL version

  • Browser name and version

Usually, it isn't necessary to specify the operating system on which the server or the client is running, unless we notice that the bug pertains to only one OS. For example, FAQ 5.1 describes a problem where the user could not create a table having more than fourteen fields. This happens only under Windows 98.

Bug description

We should give a precise description of what happens (including any error message, the expected results, and the effective results we get). Reports are easily managed if they describe only one problem per bug report (unless the problems are clearly linked).

Sometimes, it might help to attach a short export file to the bug report to help developers reproduce the problem. Screenshots are welcome.