Open source's hottest 10 apps

David M Williams
Wednesday, 20 June 2007 11:57

Business IT - Open Source

#7 – phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin needs little introduction to many blog writers worldwide; it’s become an essential tool for rescuing many a corrupt PHPNuke or WordPress database.

It doesn’t take much thought to recognise phpMyAdmin is a PHP app. What the name doesn’t quite give away is that it is a powerful web-based system for delving into MySQL databases. If you have direct access to a MySQL database server, there are a number of graphical utilities for administration and management. However, the vast majority of MySQL users don’t have such access – their databases are hosted by their ISP or webhost. Their level of access goes as far as creating a single database and then letting their software of choice do the rest of the work, be it Drupal, PHPNuke, Joomla, WordPress or any of a myriad of other LAMP offerings.

This means if your software install doesn’t go as planned – or a rogue beta trashes your production database, or you absolutely need direct access into the database for whatever reason – then there’s little that can be done with the supplied tools. This is where phpMyAdmin comes in. Download it, make a configuration file – using the precise same database location, username and password as you’ve already given your content management system - then FTP it to your webhost and fire it up in a web browser. It’s dead simple to set up and use but the power it gives is far in excess of this.

Using phpMyAdmin you can drop or re-create your entire database but the most common uses would be to add or delete individual fields to tables, to remove bad rows of data, modify individual cells in configuration tables, or to insert new data. Most functions are possible through menus and pointing and clicking but SQL queries and commands can be entered directly. Additionally, entire databases can be backed up to your local computer and restored either to the same database or to another. This makes migrating between web hosts a breeze, without losing accumulated site data like content or reader comments.

It’s no surprise that, like FileZilla, phpMyAdmin has received project of the month and 2006 community choice award accolades. In fact, it won both the database and sysadmin categories. If you have a MySQL database, phpMyAdmin is a must-have.