Table of Contents for
Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management by Marc Delisle Published by Packt Publishing, 2012
  1. Cover
  2. Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management
  3. Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management
  4. Credits
  5. About the Author
  6. About the Reviewers
  7. www.PacktPub.com
  8. Preface
  9. What you need for this book
  10. Who this book is for
  11. Conventions
  12. Reader feedback
  13. Customer support
  14. 1. Getting Started with phpMyAdmin
  15. What is phpMyAdmin?
  16. Installing phpMyAdmin
  17. Configuring phpMyAdmin
  18. Installing phpMyAdmin configuration storage
  19. Upgrading phpMyAdmin
  20. Summary
  21. 2. Configuring Authentication and Security
  22. Securing phpMyAdmin
  23. Summary
  24. 3. Over Viewing the Interface
  25. Customizing general settings
  26. Character sets and collations
  27. Navigation panel
  28. Main panel
  29. User preferences
  30. Query window
  31. Summary
  32. 4. Creating and Browsing Tables
  33. Creating our first table
  34. Inserting data manually
  35. Browse mode
  36. Profiling queries
  37. Creating an additional table
  38. Summary
  39. 5. Changing Data and Structure
  40. Changing table structure
  41. Summary
  42. 6. Exporting Structure and Data (Backup)
  43. Exporting a database
  44. Exporting a table
  45. Exporting selectively
  46. Exporting multiple databases
  47. Saving the export file on the server
  48. Memory limits
  49. Summary
  50. 7. Importing Structure and Data
  51. Importing SQL files
  52. Importing CSV files
  53. Importing other formats
  54. Reading files from a web server upload directory
  55. Displaying an upload progress bar
  56. Summary
  57. 8. Searching Data
  58. Performing a complete database search
  59. Stopping an errant query
  60. Summary
  61. 9. Performing Table and Database Operations
  62. Changing table attributes
  63. Emptying or deleting a table
  64. Renaming, moving, and copying tables
  65. Performing other table operations
  66. Multi-table operations
  67. Database operations
  68. Summary
  69. 10. Benefiting from the Relational System
  70. Defining relations with the relation view
  71. Defining relations with the Designer
  72. Benefiting from the defined relations
  73. Column commenting
  74. Summary
  75. 11. Entering SQL Statements
  76. The Query window
  77. Multi-statement queries
  78. Pretty printing (syntax highlighting)
  79. The SQL Validator
  80. Summary
  81. 12. Generating Multi-table Queries
  82. Exploring column criteria
  83. Generating automatic joins (internal relations)
  84. Executing the query
  85. The visual builder
  86. Summary
  87. 13. Synchronizing Data and Supporting Replication
  88. Supporting MySQL replication
  89. Summary
  90. 14. Using Query Bookmarks
  91. Creating bookmarks
  92. Recalling bookmarks from the bookmarks list
  93. Passing a parameter to a bookmark
  94. Summary
  95. 15. Documenting the System
  96. Generating relational schemas
  97. Summary
  98. 16. Transforming Data using MIME
  99. Enabling transformations
  100. Examples of transformations
  101. Summary
  102. 17. Supporting Features Added in MySQL 5
  103. Supporting routines—stored procedures and functions
  104. Executing code with triggers
  105. Using information_schema
  106. Partitioning
  107. Exploring the event scheduler
  108. Summary
  109. 18. Tracking Changes
  110. Prerequisites
  111. Principles
  112. Initiating tracking for one table
  113. Testing the tracking mechanism
  114. Determining tracking status
  115. Structure snapshot
  116. Exporting a version
  117. Creating a new version
  118. Deleting tracking information
  119. Summary
  120. 19. Administrating the MySQL Server
  121. Database information
  122. Server information
  123. Summary
  124. A. Troubleshooting and Support
  125. Seeking support
  126. Contributing to the project

Installing phpMyAdmin

It's time to install the product and to configure it minimally for first-time use.

Our reason for installing phpMyAdmin could be one of the following:

  • Our host provider did not install a central copy
  • Our provider installed it but the version installed is not current
  • We are working directly on our enterprise's web server

Note that we can dispense with the phpMyAdmin installation step, if we choose instead to install one of the AMP products that usually include phpMyAdmin as part of their offering. Further details are available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMP_packages.

Required information

Some host providers offer an integrated web panel where we can manage accounts, including MySQL accounts, and also a file manager that can be used to upload web content. Depending on this, the mechanism we use to transfer phpMyAdmin source files to our web space may vary. We will need some of the following specific information before starting the installation:

  • The web server's name or address. Here, we will assume it to be www.mydomain.com.
  • Our web server's account information (username, password). This information will be used either for FTP or SFTP transfer, SSH login, or web control panel login.
  • The MySQL server's name or IP address. If this information is not available, a good alternate choice is localhost, which means that the MySQL server is located on the same machine as the web server. We will assume this to be localhost.
  • Our MySQL server's account information (username, password).

System requirements

The up-to-date requirements for a specific phpMyAdmin version are always stated in the accompanying Documentation.html. For phpMyAdmin 3.4, the minimum PHP version required is PHP 5.2 with session support, the Standard PHP Library (SPL) and JSON support. Moreover, the web server must have access to a MySQL server (version 5.0 or later)—either locally or on a remote machine. It is strongly recommended that the PHP mcrypt extension be present for improved performance in cookie-authentication mode (more on this in Chapter 2). In fact, on a 64-bit server, this extension is required.

On the browser side, cookie support must be activated, irrespective of any authentication mode we use.

Downloading the files

There are various files available in the Download section of http://www.phpmyadmin.net. There might be more than one version offered here and it is always a good idea to download the latest stable version. We only need to download one file, which works regardless of the platform (browser, web server, MySQL, or PHP version). For version 3.4, there are two groups of files—english and all-languages. If we need only the English interface, we can download a file whose name contains english, for example, phpMyAdmin-3.4.5-english.zip. On the other hand, if we have the need for at least one other language, choosing all-languages would be appropriate.

If we are using a server supporting only PHP 4—for which the PHP team has discontinued support since 31st December, 2007—the latest stable version of phpMyAdmin is not a good choice for download. We can use version 2.11.x, which is the latest branch that supports PHP 4, although the phpMyAdmin team has discontinued supporting this version too.

The files offered have various extensions: .zip, .tar.bz2, .tar.gz, .tar.xz, and .7z. Download a file having an extension for which you have the corresponding extractor. In the Windows world, .zip is the most universal file format, although it is bigger than .gz or .bz2 (common in the Linux/Unix world). The .7z extension denotes a 7-Zip file, which is a format that achieves a higher compression ratio than the other formats offered; an extractor is available at http://www.7-zip.org. In the following examples, we will assume that the chosen file was phpMyAdmin-3.4.5-all-languages.zip.

After clicking on the appropriate file, the nearest mirror site is chosen by SourceForge.net. The file will start to download, and we can save it on our computer.

Installing on different platforms

The next step depends on the platform you are using. The following sections detail the procedures for some common platforms. You may proceed directly to the relevant section.

Installing on a remote server using a Windows client

Using the Windows Explorer, we double-click on the phpMyAdmin-3.4.5-all-languages.zip file we just downloaded on the Windows client. A file extractor should start, showing us all the scripts and directories inside the main phpMyAdmin-3.4.5-all-languages directory.

Use whichever mechanism your file extractor offers to save all the files, including sub-directories, to some location on your workstation. Here, we have chosen C:\. Therefore, a C:\phpMyAdmin-3.4.5-all-languages directory has been created by the extractor.

Now, it's time to transfer the entire directory structure C:\phpMyAdmin-3.4.5-all-languages to the web server in our web space. We use our favorite SFTP or FTP software or the web control panel for the transfer.

The exact directory under which we transfer phpMyAdmin may vary. It could be our public_html directory or another directory where we usually transfer web documents to. For further instructions about the exact directory to be used or the best way to transfer the directory structure, we can consult our host provider's help desk.

After the transfer is complete, these files can be removed from our Windows machine as they are no longer needed.

Installing on a local Linux server

Let us say we chose phpMyAdmin-3.4.5-all-languages.tar.gz and downloaded it directly to some directory on the Linux server. We move it to our web server's document root directory (for example, /var/www/html) or to one of its sub-directories (for example, /var/www/html/utilities). We then extract it with the following shell command or by using any graphical file extractor that our window manager offers: 

tar -xzvf phpMyAdmin-3.4.5-all-languages.tar.gz

We must ensure that the permissions and ownership of the directory and files are appropriate for our web server. The web server user or group must be able to read them.

Installing on a local Windows server (Apache, IIS)

The procedure here is similar to that described in the Installation on a remote server using a Windows client section, except that the target directory will be under our DocumentRoot (for Apache) or our wwwroot (for IIS). Of course, we do not need to transfer anything after modifications are made to config.inc.php (described in the next section), as the directory is already on the web space.

Apache is usually run as a service. Hence, we have to ensure that the user under which the service is running has normal read privileges to access our newly created directory. The same principle applies to IIS, which uses the IUSR_machinename user. This user must have read access to the directory. You can adjust permissions in the Security/permissions tab of the directory's properties.