Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management: Increase your MySQL productivity and control by discovering the real power of phpMyAdmin 2.11



This is both a timely and largely timeless book for web developers and administrators who work with MySQL and PHP. While the software will change from time to time on a normal release schedule - the baseline functionality will remain intact.



Marc Delisle did a fine job of balancing his analysis and content for both beginners as well as more seasoned veterans to database administration. The book encompasses installation, setup, getting started and standard functions as well as more advanced capabilities of phpMyAdmin.



There are really four key areas where, from my own experience as an analyst and web administrator, the majority of issues and questions surface when using MySQL.



1) Configuration

2) Administering users and permissions

3) Maintaining and equally as important backing up and restoring databases or tables

4) Advanced techniques (using SQL and querying) and reporting



Configuration

Mr. Delisle handled the configuration of the system well, clearly illustrating how most users will use phpMyAdmin on a single server. I was relieved to see his coverage of multi-server setup and attention paid to secure methods of authentication in this multi-server mode.



I felt this was clearly defined and easy to replicate when testing the "how-to" approach to this topic. This allows administrators a simple way to handle multiple databases on multiple servers if they are servicing clients who require dedicated installations for their data.



Users and Permissions

This was one of my own biggest stumbling blocks when I started using MySQL and there were not many easy to use tools to simplify these administering efforts. phpMyAdmin deftly handles this core function of managing MySQL. This is covered in detail in Chapter 19.



Database and Table Maintenance

One of the challenges of the web world is that most administrators charged with overseeing the web presence of smaller business or hobbyists are not by trade database administrators. phpMyAdmin enables a novice administrator to tackle some of the key tasks - such as indexing larger tables to improve performance, importing tables via SQL, exporting data and even backing up and restoring.



There is an entire community committed to just educating on database tuning and maintenance and phpMyAdmin provides the tools for doing so as the administrator develops this knowledge base.



Advanced Techniques

One of the benefits of a good how-to guide is that is graduates progressively from getting started to an appendix of advanced techniques. As users build confidence with phpMyAdmin they can take advantage of the guidance in this book on tasks requiring multi-table queries, creating views, triggers or stored procedures (specific to MySQL 5.x).



Overall, this title provides comprehensive coverage of phpMyAdmin due to Mr. Delisle's long career in maintaining and developing with MySQL.