Table and Database Operations - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 162

Impact of switching connection collation
Changing the connection collation (from the home page collation dialog) can have
unexpected effects. Let's switch it to latin1_bin and browse our author table again:

The data encoded in UTF-8 in the database is now (wrongly) interpreted as being in
latin1 , introducing an inconsistency in the display. Therefore, we have to be careful
with our collation changes, and you should revert the collation changes made in this
section and the previous one.

Table options
Other attributes that influence the table's behavior may be specified using the Table
options dialog:

The options are:

• PACK_KEY S : Setting this attribute results in a smaller index. This can

be read faster but takes more time to update. Available for the MyISAM
storage engine.
CHECKSUM • : This makes MySQL compute a checksum for each row. This

results in slower updates, but finding of corrupted tables becomes easier.
Available for MyISAM only.
DELAY_KE • Y_WRITE : This instructs MySQL not to write the index

updates immediately, but to queue them for writing later. This improves
performance. Available for MyISAM only.
ROW_FORM • AT : To the storage engines that support this feature (MyISAM,

InnoDB, PBXT, and Maria), a choice of row format is presented. The default
value being the current state of this table's row format.