Benefiting from the Relational System - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management - page 180

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.
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.
Defining relations with the relation view
After the installation of the phpMyAdmin configuration storage, there are more
options available in the Database view and the Table view. We will now examine
the Relation view link in the Structure page of the Table view.