Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Tracking Changes
This chapter will examine how we can use the change-tracking mechanism, in order
to record structure and data changes done from the phpMyAdmin interface and to
obtain reports about such changes.
Understanding the goals of the tracking
system
Each software application has its own idea of what changes are important to track for
its users. This section describes tracking systems that exist in other applications, and
compares them to the one offered by phpMyAdmin.
Tracking in other software applications
Having access to historic data that displays all of the changes made to an information
system is a feature that is taken for granted in many software products. The "undo"
feature of any serious word-processing software is an example of being able to go
back in time, albeit one step at the time. A more complex example would be the
history feature of MediaWiki (the core software of Wikipedia). It enables us to go
back to any state of a given page, to see the changes between any two versions, and
even to mark any older version as the current one. Tracking information includes the
author (or IP address), the date and time of change, and a comment.
In MySQL itself, the logging system (
binlog
) records all changes made to the
database; however, in this case, the goal is two-fold:
• To allow master-slave synchronization
• To enable restoration via the
mysqlbinlog
command-line utility
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