What Is phpMyAdmin? What phpMyAdmin used for? Alternative solutuion.

phpMyAdmin is a free web application that provides a convenient GUI for working with the MySQL database management system. It is the most popular MySQL administration tool, used by millions of users worldwide, and has won numerous awards and honors.

Download for Free

Version 8.5.3 , built on March 5, 2024. 116 MB
30-day full-featured trial period

General Features of phpMyAdmin

This PHP utility has all common functions that you may need when developing a MySQL-based application or website. It is also a reference for several similar products, for example, phpPgAdmin, which provides similar functions for the PostgreSQL DBMS.

Overview of phpMyAdmin Capabilities

You can use phpMyAdmin for Windows or almost any other operating system ever existed. It can export and import database created and managed by MySQL DBMS, and works with some other data formats.

The list of formats supported by phpMyAdmin includes SQL, CVS, CodeGen, CVS for Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word 2000, JSON, LaTeX, MediaWiki Table, OpenDocument Spreadsheet, OpenDocument Text, PDF, PHP Array, Texy! Text and YAML data types.

Key Options

With phpMyAdmin, you can do such things as:

Create and remove users, manage user permissions

Create, alter and drop databases, tables, fields and rows

Search objects in the entire database or any particular tables

Import and export data in different formats, including SQL, XML and CSV

Monitor processes and track performance of different queries

Execute user-defined SQL queries

Back up your MySQL databases in manual mode

The tool is very simple to set up and use. It is usually installed on the same computer with MySQL database, so all commands are executed very quickly and do not rely on network connectivity.

Administering MySQL DBMS

While phpMyAdmin is a perfect tool for browsing the database, managing user privileges and executing SQL queries, it is not a full-featured SQL administration tool. It lacks some protective measures for unpredictable situations, such as SQL injections, user mistakes and other cases of database corruption.

Tip: The only answer to these perils isautomatic MySQL backup.

Data Backup Problems of phpMyAdmin

The export/import functionality of phpMyAdmin lacks a lot of the features that you would expect to find in a backup software solution:

Scheduling. With phpMyAdmin there is no way to export database data automatically.
Storage media support. Since phpMyAdmin is a web-based software, you can work with it via browser only. This means that you can save backups only to local drives available on your system, via the Save As... dialog of your browser.
Compression, encryption, and other options. The phpMyAdmin saves dumps as common text files, without options for any additional data processing. Storing these files in the original form usually occupies a lot of disk space, and can compromise security sometimes.

Dumping MySQL Databases with phpMyAdmin

A very useful feature of phpMyAdmin is that it make MySQL backup asdatabase dumps, similarly to how Handy Backup and mysqldump utility. You can freely use the resulting files for disaster recovery, to conduct different experiments or to migrate from MySQL to another database management system.

Learn more about MySQL dump capabilities on theMySQL Recovery feature page.

Advantages of Handy Backup over phpMyAdmin as MySQL Backup Software

Task Automation

You can schedule any Handy Backup task to run at an exactly predefined time, and repeat it with an exact interval from one minute to several months. In advanced mode, you can also trigger a task to run when some crucial system event (such as user logon/logoff) occurs.

Data Security

Like phpMyAdmin, Handy Backup allows storing dumps as text files with SQL commands. In addition, it provides such functions as data compression and encryption by built-in algorithms, which can add greatly to security and reduce the size of backups in storage.

Storage Diversity

Unlike phpMyAdmin, Handy Backup allows directly placing MySQL backups to several different places, including local and external drives, network shared resources. FTP servers, S3 and WebDAV clouds (both private and commercial), and popular cloud storage like Amazon S3, Box, Google Drive or Dropbox.

Download for Free

Version 8.5.3 , built on March 5, 2024. 116 MB
30-day full-featured trial period

Tip: Read about how to back up with one more management tool that has all the features of phpMyAdmin - HeidiSQL backup.

See also:

phpMyAdmin Definition