Creating and Browsing Tables - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management - page 73

There are other attributes for columns, but we will leave them empty in this example.
You might notice the Add 1 column(s) dialog at the bottom of the screen. We can
use it to add some columns to this table-creation panel by entering the appropriate
value and hitting Go . The number of input rows would change according to the new
number of columns, leaving intact the information already entered about the irst
four columns. Before saving the page, let us deine some keys.
Choosing keys
A table should normally have a primary key (a column with unique content that
represents each row). Having a primary key is recommended for row identiication,
better performance, and possible cross-table relations. A good value here is the ISBN;
so, in the Index dialog we select PRIMARY for the isbn column. Other possibilities
for index type include INDEX , UNIQUE , and FULLTEXT (more on this in Chapter 5 ).
Index management (also referred to as Key management) can
be done at initial table creation, or later in the Structure page of
Table view.
To improve the speed of the queries that we will make by author_id , we should add
an index on this column. The right part of our screen now looks as shown in the
following screenshot:
At this point, we could pick a different Storage Engine from the corresponding
drop-down menu. However, for the time being, we will just accept the default
storage engine.