PhpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle MySQL administration through web pages, using a web browser. Currently you can create and drop databases, create, drop and alter tables, drop, edit and add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields, manage privileges, export data in various formats and is available in 72 languages. It is available under the GPL Version 2 license.

This project has been running since 1998, being the best evaluated in the SourceForge.net download community as the download of the month of December 2002. As this tool runs on machines with Web Servers and PHP Support and MySQL, the technology used has been changing during its development.

History

Tobias Ratschiller, then an IT consultant and later founder of Maguma, a software company, began work on building a PHP client-server based administrative network on MySQL in 1998 and was inspired by Peter Kuppelwieser and his MySQL -Webadmin. By the time Ratschiller left the project due to lack of time, as well as phpAdsNew, of which he is also the inventor, phpMyAdmin had become one of the most popular PHP applications, and MySQL administration tools constituted a large community of users and administrators. It is worth noting that this included a good contribution from Linux distributors.

To coordinate the growing number of patches, three software developers, Olivier Müller, Marc Delisle and Loïc Chapeaux, registered the phpMyAdmin project on SourceForge.net and it continued its growth in 2001.

Specifications

Specifications provided by the program include:

1. Web interface for graphics management.
2. MySQL, MariaDB and Drizzle database handler.
3. Import data from CSV and SQL
4. Export data to various formats: CSV, SQL, XML, PDF (via the TCPDF library), ISO/IEC 26300 - OpenDocument Text and Spreadsheet, Word, Excel, LaTeX and others.
5. Managing multiple servers.
6. Create PDF graphics of database design.
7. Create complex queries using Query-by-Example (QBE).
8. Global search in a database or subset of this.
9. Transforms stored data to such as BLOB.
10. Live charts to monitor MySQL server activities such as connections, processes, use of CPU and/or memory, etc.

Current state

The software, currently available in 72 languages, is maintained by the phpMyAdmin Project under the responsibility of Olivier Müller, Marc Delisle, Alexander M. Turek, Michal Čihař and Garvin Hicking.

It also supports the MariaDB engine (engine versions 5.1 and 5.2 were tested) and from version 3.5 the Drizzle engine is supported.

Similar products

A similar tool is phpPgAdmin, which offers similar functionality for PostgreSQL and started out as a copy of phpMyAdmin but with a completely different code base.

Other products for managing Microsoft SQL Server databases are phpMSAdmin.

Another database manager known as Adminer (formerly known as phpMinAdmin) for managing MySQL, has the most important features of phpMyAdmin, but consists of a single php.