MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 Support - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 269

You won't see PBMS in the storage engine choices of the Operations
subpage for a table. PBMS is not a storage engine that can be associated
with the structure of a table.
Configuration
Some PBMS system variables have an impact on BLOB streaming behaviour, and can
be defined in config.inc.php . More details about them on http://blobstreaming.
org/documentation/#sysvar . The recommended values to be put in your server's
definition are:
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['bs_garbage_threshold'] = 50;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['bs_repository_threshold'] = '32M';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['bs_temp_blob_timeout'] = 600;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['bs_temp_log_threshold'] = '32M';
Implementation limitations in phpMyAdmin
In the current 3.1.1 version of phpMyAdmin, a few limitations exist, with respect to
using BLOB streaming. The first limitation has to do with the MySQL server. On a
server which has just started, the pbms_field_references global MySQL variable
may be set to off . As field references are used extensively for BLOB referencing,
phpMyAdmin tries to set the parameter to on , and this can be done only by a
user possessing the SUPER privilege. Therefore, such a user must log in once via
phpMyAdmin to set this parameter to the appropriate value, and this will have
to be repeated on each restart of the MySQL server.
The second limitation is related to the upload mechanism used to send data to the
BLOB repository. The data has to travel first from your workstation to the web
server, and then from the web server to the MySQL server. The first travel occurs via
a normal HTTP upload. Please refer to Chapter 8, Importing Structure and Data , in the
Limits for the transfer section, for more details on the requirements for uploading. To
avoid being hindered by this limit, you can use the web server upload directory
(also described in Chapter 8).
An important note about the host name is due here: In config.inc.
php , your server name in $cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] should
be a FQDN ( (fully-qualified domain name ). It should not something like
"localhost"; otherwise, the links used to retrieve streaming data will
not work.