In PHP and MySQL programming, we can send only one query at a time using the mysql_query() function call. phpMyAdmin allows us to send many queries in one transmission, using a semicolon as a separator. Suppose we type the following query in the query box:

INSERT INTO author VALUES (100,'Paul Smith','111-2222');
INSERT INTO author VALUES (101,'Melanie Smith','222-3333');
UPDATE author SET phone='444-5555' WHERE name LIKE '%Smith%';

We will receive the following results screen:

We see the number of affected rows through comments because $cfg['VerboseMultiSubmit'] is set to TRUE.

Let us send the same list of queries again and watch the results:

It is normal to receive a Duplicate entry error message that says the value 100 exists already. We are seeing the results of the first INSERT statement; but what happens to the next one? Execution stops at the first error because $cfg['IgnoreMultiSubmitErrors'] is set to FALSE telling phpMyAdmin not to ignore errors in multiple statements. If it is set to TRUE, the program successively tries all the statements, and we see two Duplicate entry errors.

This feature would not work as expected, if we tried more than one SELECT statement. We would see the results of only the last SELECT statement.