Importing Structure and Data - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.8 for Effective MySQL Management - page 127

value can be recommended - it depends on the size of uploaded data. The memory
limit can also be tuned via the $cfg['MemoryLimit'] parameter, as seen in Chapter 7.
Finally, file uploads must be allowed by setting file_uploads to On . Otherwise,
phpMyAdmin won't even show the Location of the textfile dialog. It would be
useless to display this dialog, since the connection would be refused later by the
PHP server.
Partial Imports
If the file is too big, there are ways in which we can resolve the situation. If we still
have access to the original data, we could use phpMyAdmin to generate smaller
CSV export files, choosing the Dump n rows starting at record # n dialog. If this is
not possible, we will have to use a text editor to split the file into smaller sections.
Another possibility is to use the UploadDir mechanism.
In recent phpMyAdmin versions, the Partial import feature can also solve this file
size problem. By selecting the Allow interrupt… checkbox, the import process will
interrupt itself if it detects it is close to the time limit. We can also specify a number
of queries to skip from the start, in case we successfully imported a number of rows
and wish to continue from that point.
Importing SQL Files
Any file containing MySQL statements can be imported via this mechanism. The
dialog is available in the Database view or the Table view, via the Import sub-page,
or in the Query window.