The Relational System - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management - page 167

Location of the Infrastructure
There are two possible places to store these tables:

• In a user's database. Thus every web developer owning a database can

benefit from these features.
In a dedicated database, which we call pmadb (phpMyAdmin database). In a
multi-user installation (discussed later), this database may be accessible for a
number of users while keeping the metadata private.

•

Because this infrastructure does not exist by default, and because phpMyAdmin's
developers want to promote it, the interface displays the following error message for
every database when on the Operations sub-page in the Database view:

This message can be disabled with the following parameter (which by default, is set
to FALSE ):

$cfg['PmaNoRelation_DisableWarning'] = TRUE;

Installing Linked-Tables Infrastructure
The previous error message is displayed even if only part of the infrastructure is
lacking. On a fresh installation, of course, all parts are lacking: our database has
not yet heard of phpMyAdmin and needs to be outfitted with this infrastructure.
Following the here link in this message brings up the following explanation:

The message is the same regardless of the current database (here, marc_
book ) because the infrastructure is shared for all our databases and tables
(or all users on a multi-user installation).

As the previous screenshot suggests, the PMA Database is not OK . It's important to
realize that the relational system will work only if two conditions are met:

•
•

Proper definitions are present in config.inc.php .
The corresponding tables (and maybe the database) are created.