From the course: SQL: Data Reporting and Analysis

Get familiar with phpMyAdmin - SQL Tutorial

From the course: SQL: Data Reporting and Analysis

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Get familiar with phpMyAdmin

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- [Instructor] You already know that we are going to use a demo database online, and to find that we can Google demo Sakila database in any order, and there it is. The reason I'm asking you to Google, instead of giving you a permanent link is because sometimes the link changes. This is a free resource to help people learn and use SQL. So, here, is the demo that we are going to be using. Let's have a look around the screen. In the top left, we have a logo for phpMyAdmin. This is the name of the software that we're going to use. I'm not sure who named it. It doesn't trip off the tongue, but it is an open source database software that you can actually download and use on any database that you like. If we look at the top left, where it says current server, underneath there's a dropdown. Dropdown gives us two options. They're both demo databases. One says Maria DB, and the other one says MySQL, and I just want to show you something in Maria DB. On the left here, are a list of all of the databases available. And you can see that the Sakila database is available in Maria DB. Now, we're not going to use that one. We're going to use the Sakila database in the MySQL server, but if you were to turn up one day and not be able to find the Sakila database in MySQL, you could change the current server to be Maria DB, and your queries ought to work exactly the same. Maria DB and MySQL are virtually identical. This database list on the left will change all the time because remember that anyone in the whole world can edit this database. We want the Sakila database, which I've clicked, and you can tell I've clicked it because there's a breadcrumb bar at the top, and it says server, demo MySQL, within which database equals Sakila. So, we have now selected the Sakila database. Along the top, underneath the breadcrumb bar, we can see a number of tabs, structure, SQL, search query, et cetera. The main ones we are going to be using are the structure and SQL tabs and a third tab called browse, which we shall see in a minute. The structure tab is really important. At the moment, it's listing all of the tables and views that occur within the Sakila database, but it's context dependent. So, if we click on the actor table, we are then taken to a browse tab, but if we go back to the structure tab you can see it's changed substantially. And now, instead of listing all the tables in the database, it lists all the fields in the table. So, it's drilled down for us, and the breadcrumb bar reflects that too. Within the Sakila database it tells us we have now selected the actor table. So, this breadcrumb bar is really helpful to stop you getting lost. Now, in the structure tab, we can see that we have four fields in the actor table, actor ID, first name, last name, and last update. If we go back to the browse tab, you can see these field names shown again. This time they're shown horizontally instead of vertically, actor ID, first name, last name, last update. The purpose of the browse tab is to let you see the actual data inside of the table. So, under these field names, we can see names, IDs, and dates in the respective columns. The final tab to look at is the SQL tab, which is where we enter our queries and run them by clicking go. So, that's a really quick tour of phpMyAdmin, which is the interface we're going to use in this course. Coming up we take a quick look at the Sakila database, which is populated with fake data, and I'll explain to you what that fake data is meant to be.

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