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

Chapter 10. Benefiting from the Relational System

The relational system allows users to work more closely with phpMyAdmin, as we will see in the following chapters. This chapter explains how to define inter-table relations.

Relational MySQL

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. Examples of this would be queries to "get an invoice and all its items" and "get all books by an author".

In the earlier versions of phpMyAdmin, the relational data structure (how tables relate to each other) was not stored within MySQL. Tables were programmatically joined by the applications to generate meaningful results.

This was considered a shortcoming of MySQL by phpMyAdmin developers and users. Therefore, the team started to build an infrastructure to support relations for MyISAM tables, which is now called the phpMyAdmin configuration storage. The infrastructure evolved to support a growing array of special features such as query bookmarks and MIME-based transformations.

Now-a-days, relations between tables are normally defined natively with the FOREIGN KEY feature of the InnoDB and PBXT storage engines. phpMyAdmin supports both this type of relations and those defined for MyISAM.

InnoDB and PBXT

InnoDB (http://www.innodb.com) is a MySQL storage engine developed by Innobase Oy, a subsidiary of Oracle. Prior to MySQL 5.5, this storage engine may not be available as it must be activated by a system administrator; however, it's the default storage engine in version 5.5.

The PrimeBase XT storage engine or PBXT (http://www.primebase.org) is developed by PrimeBase Technologies. The minimum MySQL required version is 5.1, as this version supports the pluggable storage engine API that is used by PBXT and other third parties to offer alternative storage engines. This transactional storage engine is newer than InnoDB. It is usually installed after downloading it from their website and then going through a compilation step. For some operating systems, a precompiled binary is available—please visit the aforementioned website for download and installation instructions.

When considering the relational aspect, here are the benefits of using the InnoDB or PBXT storage engine for a table:

They support referential integrity based on foreign keys, which are the keys in a foreign (or reference) table. By contrast, using only phpMyAdmin's internal relations (discussed later) brings no automatic referential integrity verification.

The exported structure for InnoDB and PBXT tables contains the defined relations. Therefore, they are easily imported back for better cross-server interoperability.

The foreign key feature of these storage engines can effectively replace the part of phpMyAdmin's configuration storage that deals with relations. We will see how phpMyAdmin interfaces with the InnoDB and PBXT foreign key system.

Note

The other parts of phpMyAdmin's configuration storage (for example, bookmarks) have no equivalent in InnoDB, PBXT, or MySQL. Hence, they are still required to access the complete phpMyAdmin feature set. However, in MySQL 5.x, views are supported, and have similarities with phpMyAdmin's bookmarks.