phpMyAdmin is a very powerful and easy-to-use tool created in PHP to handle the administration of MySQL. Within phpMyAdmin, you can perform a database drop, create/delete/alter tables, delete/edit/add files, execute any SQL statement, make keys in the field, and import/export data in a different format.
How to Access phpMyAdmin
- Login to cPanel
- Scroll down to the Databases section
- Click on phpMyAdmin and it will open a new tab that will look similar to the image below:
First we will be going over the functions of each option in the menu bar at the top of phpMyAdmin
- Databases: Displays all of your databases and allows you to check the privileges for each. In most cases they will not have any privileges set up by default, and you don’t need any to keep working.
- SQL: Run SQL queries. For more details on SQL, check out this resource: SQL docs.
- Status: Displays the server status, traffic, processes, and query statistics
- Export: Downloads a copy of your database in any format that is available.
- Import: Uploads database to phpMyAdmin within the maximum disk size of 50MB.
- Settings: Changes temporary configuration. Only works for the current session.
- Charsets: Displays the database collation.
- Engines: Shows information regarding storage engines
- Plugins: Displays information regarding the three plugins: Authentication, Information Schema and Storage Engine
Managing Databases
We will now be going over the basics of what you can do to your database within phpMyAdmin. The image below shows you some database to the left and you are able to click the dropdown to see the tables of that database. You are able to get more details by clicking on the database name then it it will display the tables with more detailed information on to the right hand side. You’re able to see the table name, the amount of rows it contains, and disk size of the each table. For each table you are able to perform different actions and we will be going over those actions below.
- Star: Add to Favorites
- Browse: Shows contents of table
- Structure:Will do the same as browse, but gives more options to make changes
- Search: Search the contents on that table
- Insert: Create a new row for the table
- Empty: This will delete the content of the selected table
- Drop:This will completely remove the table and its content
