phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL using a web browser. It is usually in the top ten most active projects at Sourceforge as there is constant ongoing development to make it better and available in more languages. As of release 2.5.4 it is available in 47 languages.

When you don't have shell access to a server to run MySQL on the command line, usually the only way you can administer your website's database is to use phpMyAdmin. Other tools are available, but for remote access phpMyAdmin is by far the best. There's no compilation required of any source files; the pages are coded in PHP and have been tested in a wide variety of browsers and platforms. All you need to do is configure it using the configuration file by setting the login name and password and away you go. Of course, you need to have a webserver that supports PHP and runs MySQL...

phpMyAdmin can be used to administer users; create and drop databases; create, drop and alter tables; insert, update and select data; export data to text files; view MySQL system and runtime information.

If you are developing a database on your own computer, an excellent tool for doing this is the MySQL control center, which is available for both Unix systems and Windows.

Some screenshots of phpMyAdmin are shown below.

Browsing the list of tables in the database using phpMyAdmin.

Browsing the data in a single table in a MySQL database using phpMyAdmin.

Veiwing the structure of a MySQL database table using phpMyAdmin.