Benefiting from the Relational System - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management - page 182

This screen allows us to create Internal relation (stored in the pma_relation table)
as MySQL itself does not have any relational notion for MyISAM tables. The empty
drop-down list next to each column indicates that there are no relations (links) to any
foreign table.
Defining the relation
We can relate each column of the book table to a column in another table (or in the
same table because self-referencing relations are sometimes necessary). The interface
finds both the unique and the non-unique keys in all the tables of the same database,
and presents the keys in drop-down lists. (Creating internal relations to other
databases from the interface is not currently supported.) The appropriate choice for the
author_id column is to select the corresponding id column from the author table.
We then click on Save , and the definition is saved in phpMyAdmin's configuration
storage. To remove the relation, we would just come back to the screen, select the
empty choice, and click on Save .
Defining the display column
The primary key of our author table is the id , which is a unique number that we
made up for key purposes. The author's name is the natural way to refer to an
author. It would be interesting to see the author's name when browsing the book
table. This is the purpose of the display column. We should normally define a
display column for each table that participates in a relation as a foreign table.
We will see how this information is displayed in the Benefiting from the defined
relations section. We now go to the Relation view for the author table (which is the
foreign table in this case) and specify the display column. We choose name as the
display column and click on Save , as shown in the following screenshot: