Changing Table Structures - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 105

phpMyAdmin handles BIT fields in a binary way. For example, if we edit one
row and set a value of 101 to the some_bits column, the following query is sent at
save time:
UPDATE `marc_book`.`book` SET ` some_bits` = b '101'
WHERE `book`.`isbn` = '1-234567-89-0' LIMIT 1;
The highlighted part of this query shows that the column really receives a binary
value. At browse time, the exact field value (which in decimal is 5—a meaningless
value for our purposes) is redisplayed in its binary form 101 , which helps to interpret
each discrete bit value.
Index management
phpMyAdmin has a number of index management options, which will be covered in
this section.
Single-field indexes
We have already seen how the Structure panel offers a quick way to create an index
on a single field, thanks to some quick links such as Primary , Index , and Unique .
Under the field list (in the Details slider), there is a section of the interface available
to manage indexes:
This section has links to edit or delete every index. Here, the Field part lists only one
field per index, and we can see that the whole field participates in the index. This is
because there is no size information after each field name, contrary to what will be
seen in our next example.