Introduction and Installation - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 3

Being open source since its existence, it has enjoyed support from numerous
developers and translators worldwide (being translated into 55 languages at
the time of writing this topic). The project is currently hosted on SourceForge.

Host providers everywhere are showing their trust in phpMyAdmin by installing
it on their servers. The popular Cpanel (a website control application) interfaces
with phpMyAdmin. In addition, we can install our own copy of phpMyAdmin
inside our webspace as long as our provider respects the minimum requirements
(see the System Requirements section later in this chapter).

phpMyAdmin features
The goal of phpMyAdmin is to offer complete web-based management of MySQL
servers and data, and to keep up with MySQL and web standards evolution. While
the product is not perfect, it currently includes the most commonly requested
features and other extra features.

The development team constantly fine-tunes the product based on the reported bugs
and requested features, releasing new versions regularly.

phpMyAdmin offers features that cover basic MySQL database and table operations.
It also has an internal relational system that maintains metadata to support advanced
features. Finally, system administrators can manage users and privileges from
phpMyAdmin. It is important to note that phpMyAdmin's choice of available
operations depends on the rights the user has on a specific MySQL server.

The basic features consist of:

• Database creation, deletion, renaming, and attribute changes

• Table creation, renaming, copying, and deletion

• Table structure maintenance, including indexes

• Special table operations (repair, optimization, and changing type)

• Data insertion, modification, deletion

• Data display in horizontal/vertical mode, and Print view

• Data navigation and sorting

• Binary data uploading

• Data search (table or database)

• Querying by example (multi-table)

• Batch loading of data (import)

• Exporting structure and data in various formats, with compression

• Multi-user and multi-server installation with web-based setup