Performing Table and Database Operations - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management - page 175

Renaming, moving, and copying tables
The Rename operation is the easiest to understand—the table simply changes its
name and stays in the same database.
The Move operation (shown in the following screenshot) manipulates a table in two
ways—changes its name and also the database in which it is stored.
Moving a table is not directly supported by MySQL. So, phpMyAdmin has to create
the table in the target database, copy the data, and then finally drop the source table.
This could take a long time depending on the table's size.
The Copy operation leaves the original table intact and copies its structure or data
(or both) to another table, possibly in another database. Here, the book-copy table
will be an exact copy of the book source table. After the copy, we remain in the Table
view for the book table, unless we selected Switch to copied table option, in which
case we are moved to the Table view of the newly created table.