The Relational System - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.8 for Effective MySQL Management - page 174

Automatic Migration
Whenever phpMyAdmin detects that column comments were stored in its metadata
and that we are using MySQL 4.1.2 or a later version, it automatically migrates these
column comments to the native MySQL column comments.
Summary
In this chapter, we covered the installation of the necessary infrastructure for keeping
special metadata (data about tables), and learned how to define relations between
both InnoDB and non-InnoDB tables. We also examined the modified behaviour of
phpMyAdmin when relations are present, foreign keys, getting information from the
table, and column-commenting.