Book Image

Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.3.x for Effective MySQL Management

Book Image

Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.3.x for Effective MySQL Management

Overview of this book

phpMyAdmin is an open source tool written in PHP to handle MySQL administration over the World Wide Web. It can execute SQL statements and manage users and their permissions. However, when it comes to exploiting phpMyAdmin to its full potential, even experienced developers and system administrators are left baffled.Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.3.x for Effective MySQL Management is an easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide that walks you through every facet of this efficient tool. Author Marc Delisle draws on his experience as one of the leading developers and project administrator of phpMyAdmin and uses his unique tutorial approach to take full advantage of its potential. This book is filled with illustrative examples that will help you understand every phpMyAdmin feature in detail.The book helps you get started with installing and configuring phpMyAdmin and looks at its features. You then work on a sample project with two basic tables and perform basic actions such as creating, editing, and deleting data, tables, and databases. You will learn how to create up-to-date backups and import the data that you have exported. You will then explore different search mechanisms and options for querying across multiple tables.The book gradually proceeds to advanced features such as defining inter-table relations and installing the linked-tables infrastructure. Some queries are out of the scope of the interface and this book will show you how to accomplish these tasks with SQL commands.New features of version 3.3.x, such as synchronizing databases on different servers and managing MySQL replication to improve performance and data security, are covered in this book. Towards the end of the book you will learn to document your database, track changes made to the database, and manage user accounts using phpMyAdmin server management features.This book is an upgrade from the previous version that covered phpMyAdmin Version 3.1. Version 3.3.x introduced features such as new import and export modules, tracking changes, synchronizing structure and data between servers, and providing support for replication.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.3.x for Effective MySQL Management
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Early events


The first internal version (0.9.0) was programmed by Tobias Ratschiller from Switzerland, and bears the date September 09, 1998. He then released version 1.0.1 on October 26, 1998. The early versions were offered on Tobias's site http://www.phpwizard.net (this site is no longer associated with him). Tobias wrote in the accompanying notes:

This work is based on Peter Kuppelwieser's MySQL-Webadmin. It was his idea to create a web-based interface to MySQL using PHP3. Although I have not used any of his source-code, there are some concepts I've borrowed from him. phpMyAdmin was created because Peter told me he wasn't going to further develop his (great) tool.

Compared to today's version (twelve years after the original version), the first version was somewhat limited in features. Nevertheless it could be used to create databases and tables, edit their structures, and enter and retrieve data. In the following screenshot, you can see that the navigation panel was already in place to list database names (not table names yet), and the main panel was the workspace to manage a database or table. This is how the interface for databases looked like in version 1.3.0:

To work on a table, the following screen was available:

I was using phpMyAdmin from version 1.2.0 (released November 29, 1998), and was immediately hooked to the idea of being able to use a web application to maintain a remote database. However, students at Collège de Sherbrooke, where I work in Québec, Canada, are French speaking folks. Therefore, I contacted Tobias and offered to transform his source code by outsourcing all messages to a message file. He accepted the offer, and I created both the English and French message files. Then, on December 27, 1998, Tobias released version 1.3.1, the first multi-language version. (Meanwhile, he had created the German message file.) This version was the first to display Welcome to phpMyAdmin.

In 1999 and the first half of 2000, Tobias, helped by other contributors, improved the navigation system, added features, and merged more language files. His project site maintained a discussion forum allowing new ideas to come along and patches to be discussed. Version 2.1.0 was released on August 06, 2000, and this was the last version released by Tobias, who had no more time to devote to this project.