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

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's important to choose the summary title carefully when you start a new forum thread. Titles such as "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 would be: "Import with UploadDir", "User can't but root can login", or "Server not responding".

Reading the answers

As people will read and, almost always answer, your question(s), giving feedback in the forum about the answers can really help the person who answered, and also help others also help who encounter 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, 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. (This is to avoid getting duplicate bug reports.)

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 in 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 to reproduce the problem. Screenshots are also welcome.