An Introduction to phpMyAdmin for Databases

Once you are ready to use a database in your PHP programs, you have a few options available to you for creating and working with databases. You can write your own PHP program that will set up the database and its tables or you can use a previously written program that will do this work for you. There are several prewritten applications that you can use, but the one I will use in the next few tutorials is phpMyAdmin.

The reason that I have chosen to use this program is that it is available on most hosting servers and, in case your web hosting company doesn't have it, you can download a free copy from phpMyAdmin.net and upload it to your website. Yes, I said it was free. It is an open source program written in PHP and offered free under the GPL License. The latest version supports PHP 5 and MySQL^R 4.1 and 5.0.

So what can this program do for you? It works via a web browser to act as a communication interface for creating and editing databases and database tables. All you need to do is enter the information into the web form and the program will execute the SQl statements for you. Below is a list of the most common jobs.

Database - Create and drop (remove)
Tables - Create, alter and drop
Table Fields - Add, edit and delete
SQL Statements - Execute SQL statements such as the dump (export) statement for easily making a backup of your database.

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