Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.8 for Effective MySQL Management Increase your MySQL productivity and control by discovering the real power of phpMyAdmin 2.8 Marc Delisle BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.8 for Effective MySQL Management Copyright © 2006 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First edition: April 2004 Second edition: October 2004 Third edition: October 2006 Production Reference: 2290906 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK. ISBN 1-847191-60-6 www.packtpub.com Cover Image by www.visionwt.com Credits Author Indexer Marc Delisle Mithil Kulkarni Reviewers Proofreaders Garvin Hicking Martin Brooks Alexander Turek Chris Smith Development Editor Layouts and Illustrations Louay Fatoohi Shantanu Zagade Technical Editor Cover Designer Saurabh Singh Shantanu Zagade Editorial Manager Dipali Chittar About the Author Marc Delisle started to contribute to phpMyAdmin in December 1998, when he made the first multi-language version. He has been actively involved since May 2001 as a developer and project administrator. phpMyAdmin is now a part of his life. He has worked since 1980 at Collège de Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada, as an application programmer and network manager. He has also been teaching networking, security, Linux servers, and PHP/MySQL application development. In one of his classes, he was pleased to meet a phpMyAdmin user from Argentina. I am truly grateful to Louay Fatoohi, my editor, who approached me for this book project, and accompanied me during the production; his sound comments were greatly appreciated. My thanks also go to Garvin Hicking, a member of the phpMyAdmin's development team and the reviewer for this book. Garvin's sharp eye helped in making this book clearer and more complete. Finally, there would be no book about phpMyAdmin without phpMyAdmin (the software). I wish to thank all contributors to the source code and documentation; the time they gave to the software project still inspires me and continues to push me forward. To Carole, André, Corinne, Annie, and Guillaume, with all my love. About the Reviewers Garvin Hicking is a German web developer working for Faktor E GmbH. He creates web applications using PHP and MySQL, and in his free time enjoys working on open-source projects like phpMyAdmin or Serendipity. When he's away from the computer, he likes going to the movies with his girlfriend and friends, blogging, and taking pictures. What he enjoys most about his work in Open Source is making people's everyday life easier, by giving them free, but powerful, tools to play with. Receiving feedback from satisfied users is one of the fundamental give and get principles he likes to live by. Alexander Marcus Turek was born on June 2nd, 1984 in Düsseldorf, the capital of the German province Northrhine-Westphalia. Currently, he's studying Information Engineering and Management at the University of Karlsruhe, but his origin is Mülheim an der Ruhr, the home of his family. He first got in touch with the Web in 1998, when he won a 28.8k modem at the CeBit Home in Hannover, Germany. A few months later, he learned HTML and started his first Web project, a German game patch archive called Rabus' Update Site, which he renamed to bugfixes.info, when the .info domains became available. In the meantime, he switched from static HTML to PHP in order to be able to manage the growing archive more efficiently. He kept on learning PHP when trying to extend the portal. Because the flatfile-based database system became too slow when searching the still growing archive, he also switched to MySQL in 2001. This is when he got in touch with phpMyAdmin and the project. He started with revising its language files because they were a bit outdated and inconsistent. He had fun doing so, and continued with grabbing some bug reports and submitting patches for them. Loïc Chapeaux, one of the two co-maintainers at that time, added him to the developers list and gave him a CVS account in March 2002, so he could merge his patches by himself. Since then, he has mainly worked on the compatibility with MySQL 4.0, reworked the server administration area, developed a simple abstraction layer in order to support MySQLi, and continued with compatibility fixing—this time for MySQL 4.1 and 5.0. Unfortunately, his studies and phpMyAdmin became too time consuming, and he had to stop working on bugfixes.info in 2003. Table of Contents Preface 1 Chapter 1: Introducing phpMyAdmin 7 PHP and MySQL: The Leading Open-Source Duo 8 What is phpMyAdmin? 8 History 9 Awards 12 phpMyAdmin Features Summary 13 Summary 14 Chapter 2: Installing phpMyAdmin 15 System Requirements 15 Downloading the Files 16 Installation 16 Installation on a Remote Server Using a Windows Client 16 Installation on a Local Linux Server 17 Installation on Local Windows Servers (Apache, IIS) 18 First Connection Configuration 18 Configuration Principles 18 Web-Based Setup Script 19 Manual Creation of config.inc.php 24 Tips for Editing config.inc.php on a Windows Client 24 The config.inc.php File 24 PmaAbsoluteUri 25 Server-Specific Sections 25 extension 26 PersistentConnections 26 connect_type, socket and port 26 compress Configuration 27 Authentication Type: config 27 Testing the First Connection 28 Table of Contents Multi-Server Configuration 28 Servers Defined in the Configuration File 29 Arbitrary Server 29 Advanced Authentication 30 Authentication Types Offered 30 The Control User 31 HTTP Authentication 31 Cookie Authentication 32 Security 34 Directory-Level Protection 34 IP-Based Access Control 34 Rules 35 Order of Interpretation for Rules 36 Simplified Rule for Root Access 36 Restricting the List of Databases 37 Protecting In-Transit Data 37 Upgrading phpMyAdmin 38 Summary 38 Chapter 3: Interface Overview 39 Panels and Windows 39 Login Panels 39 Left and Right Panels 39 Home Page 40 Views 40 Query Window 40 Starting Page 40 Window Titles Configuration 41 General Icon Configuration 41 Natural Sort Order for Database and Table Names 41 Language Selection 42 Themes 43 Theme Configuration 43 Theme Selection 44 Left Panel 44 Database and Table List 45 Light Mode 46 Full Mode 48 Table Short Statistics 48 Quick-Browsing a Table 49 Nested Display of Tables within a Database 49 Server-List Choice 50 [ ii ] Table of Contents Right Panel 51 Home Page 52 Database View 53 Table View 54 Server View 55 Icons for Home Page and Menu Tabs 56 Query Window 56 Site-Specific Header and Footer 57 MySQL Documentation Links 58 Summary 58 Chapter 4: First Steps 59 Database Creation 59 No Privileges? 59 First Database Creation Is Authorized 60 Creating Our First Table 61 Choosing the Fields 62 Table Creation 62 Choosing Keys 64 Manual Data Insertion 66 Data Entry Panel Tuning for CHAR and VARCHAR 68 Browse Mode 69 SQL Query Links 70 Navigation Bar 71 Sorting Results 74 Color-Marking Rows 75 Limiting the Length of Each Column 75 Browsing Distinct Values 76 Browse-Mode Customization 77 Creating an Additional Table 77 Summary 78 Chapter 5: Changing Data 79 Edit Mode 79 Moving to Next Field with the Tab Key 80 Moving with Arrows 80 Handling NULL Values 81 Applying a Function to a Value 81 Duplicating Rows of Data 82 Multi-Row Editing 83 Editing the Next Row 84 [ iii ]