phpMyAdmin provides an intuitive user interface to manage and set settings for its interface.

Following is the description of various sections of Settings tab.

• Manage Your Settings − Main Dashboard shows the Import/Export and Reset Options. User can set up a setup script to do this process automatically as well. Script provide more fine grain control as well. Saved settings can be exported in JSON/PHP format or to browser storage and in similar fashion, it can be imported.

• Two Factor Authentication − Two factor authentication is very important for security purpose. It enables to authenticate user with additional authentication mechanism like HOTP and TOTP applications such as FreeOTP, Google Authenticator or Authy or using hardware security tokens supporting FIDO U2F, along with password authentication.

• Features − Features covers the configuration setting related to databases, text fields, page titles, warning messages, console and general settings like natural order, version checks etc.

• SQL Queries − Options related to SQL queries like show SQL queries, confirmation on drop queries and configurations on sql query box like to show explain SQL, create PHP Code, refresh options and so.

• Navigation Panel − Options covering navigation panel, navigation tree and to configure display settings for servers, databases and tables display.

• Main Panel − Options to customize startup screen, database structure, table structure, browse mode, edit mode, tabs and relational schema display.

• Export/Import − Options to customize export and import settings.

phpMyAdmin Charsets tab displays all the charsets and collations which are supported by MySQL server.

You cannot edit anything here. It is a readonly information.

phpMyAdmin Plugins tab displays all the plugins which are presently installed in MySQL server. It contains information like their version and description.

Plugins are broadly categorized in six categories −

• AUDIT

• AUTHENTICATION

• DAEMON

• FTPPARSER

• INFORMATION SCHEMA

• STORAGE ENGINE

If you click on any of the category, it will scroll to the related list of plugins.

phpMyAdmin Binary Logs tabs helps in checking the log history. It shows a glimpse of whatever we”ve done using phpMyAdmin.

Let”s select any binary logs file and click on Go button, It will display the logs history of that log file.

Here, you can check which activities has been carried out by phpMyAdmin behind the scene.

phpMyAdmin provides an intuitive user interface for user management. We can view users, edit their previleges etc.

Let”s create a user using phpMyAdmin say testuser. Click on the Add User Account link under New Section.

Create user with a strong password.

Grant Privileges.

Now click on go button and phpMyAdmin will create the user and shows the SQL used to create the user.

Now click on User accounts and verify the user with required privileges.

phpMyAdmin provides a six types of statuses under Status Tab.

• Server − Server Status tab describes the MySQL/MariaDB server status in terms of traffic and connections that server is handling. It also shares the replication status.

• Processes − Processes like root, event scheduler are shared on this dashboard. We can kill them as well.

• Queries − Query Statistics tell about the types and count of queries that has been run using phpMyAdmin interface. It includes the queries run plus the queries run by phpMyAdmin in background.

• All Status Variables − All kind of status variables are listed here with their value and description. User can filter on these variables as well.

• Monitor − Monitor dashboard helps in visual way to check and control traffic, cpu usages, connections, processes, questions, system memory and system swaps.

• Advisor − Advisor helps in analyzing the problems and provides advices for performance bottlenecks. It also provides insights on generally faced problems.

MySQL WorkBench is part of MySQL database and it provides a full featured administrative interface to execute SQL queries and MySQL management where as phpMyAdmin is a web based tool to administer the MySQL database. Following are the some of the key differences in both interfaces.

• Supported Versions − phpMyAdmin supports MySQL 5.5 onwards whereas MySQL Workbench can support any version of MySQL database.

• Graphical Interface phpMyAdmin provides an easy to understand graphical interface to run SQL commands and do SQL operations and makes it quite easy to use as compared to MySQL workbench which is quite complex for beginners.

• Script Interface phpMyAdmin provides script interface to run PHP scripts to connect to databases and do customized operations. MySQL workbench has no such option.

• Web Based phpMyAdmin is web based and may be slow and depends upon web browser heavily where as MySQL workbench is a specilized software to work with databases.

• Code Highlight phpMyAdmin does not have smart code highlight capabilities or auto-complete functionalities whereas MySQL workbench provides code highlighting and auto-complete features.

• Pricing phpMyAdmin is completely free to use. It is open source and is provided by almost all hosting service providers whereas MySQL Workbench has a community based version which is free and open source. There are other commercial versions for enterprises which are subscription based. These commercial versions have enterprise level features and support.

Following is some of the key features of phpMyAdmin.

• User friendly Web Interface − phpMyAdmin UI is quite intuitive and easy to use.

• Most of Database Operations are supported − phpMyAdmin supports most of the MySQL/MariaDB features as listed below −

  • Browse databases, tables, view, fields and indexes.

  • Create/Copy/Drop/Rename databases, tables, view, fields and indexes.

  • Server maintenance, database/tables configuration proposal.

  • Execute, Edit and bookmark SQL statements, batch queries.

  • Manage user accounts and privilleges.

  • Manage stored procedures and triggers.

• Import Data − Data can be imported from from CSV and SQL files.

• Export Data − Data can be exported to various formats like CSV, SQL, XML, PDF, ISO/IEC 26300 – OpenDocument Text and Spreadsheet, Word, LATEX and others

• Multiserver support − phpMyAdmin can be used to administrater multiple servers together.

• Graphics Support − phpMyAdmin can show graphics of database layout in various formats.

• Query-by-example − phpMyAdmin Query-by-example (QBE) can be used to create complex queries.

• Search − phpMyAdmin allows to searching globally in a database or a subset of database.

• Transformation − phpMyAdmin can help in transforming stored data into any format using a set of built-in functions, for example displaying BLOB-data as image or download-link.