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You SLA me!

Posted on 28 Apr 2009 at 11:02

Jon Honeyball wonders where in the world his data is stored, and David Moss continues his mission to get a course management system up and running.

Once it's completed, head for Start, find the tools and run MySQL Administrator. You'll need to supply a server name, a username and the password you created when you set up MySQL earlier, so in my case I went with "localhost" as the server name, "root" as the username, and the password I created earlier. MySQL Administrator should now open. On the left-hand side is a series of labelled icons that take you to various administrative areas. "Server Information" is highlighted by default and provides you with information on the instance that you're running, with both client and server information. I noticed that the tool is currently unable to identify Windows Server 2008, labelling the operating system as "unknown", but this didn't seem to affect the way it worked and I've had no problems yet. To see the databases that exist on your system, go to the bottom of the icon list and select Catalogs. You should see three schemata appear in the left-hand pane called information_schema, mysql and test. Schema is MySQL speak for "database", and so to avoid confusion I'll use the term "schema" from now on whenever I talk about a database, in order to fit in with the menu offerings in MySQL Administrator.

To create a new schema, right-click in the Schemata pane and choose "Create New Schema" from the pop-up menu. Give your schema a name, and then click on OK. The new schema will appear in the list of existing schemata and you click on it to make it the active schema. At this point you have an empty database, but before you go about doing anything with it, you'll need to pick a user account to work with it. Currently you're logged in as root and, while this is fine for what you've just done, you really don't want to be using root as the default account for managing your schema. Look up the list of icons and you'll see one labelled User Administration. Click on that and then on Add New User in the right-hand pane.

Give your user a name and password and any additional information you like, then click on the Schema Privileges tab. Select your schema from the Schemata list in the left-hand pane and then click on the << button to assign all the available privileges to that user. You should see the contents of the Available Privileges pane move into the Assigned Privileges pane. Click on when you've done that and you're ready to rock. Close down MySQL Administrator and then open it again and log in with the new user's details. You should see that you have access only to the new schema you just created and information_schema - the test schema should no longer appear in that list. You're now able to start setting up the schema, adding tables and so on.

In addition to MySQL Administrator you'll almost certainly want to use another tool for managing your MySQL schemata, and the one most commonly used is called phpMyAdmin, which you'll find at www.pcpro/links/176serv3. phpMyAdmin is so-called not because it's a graphical tool designed to look after PHP, but because it's a graphical tool written in PHP, designed to give you a web interface to MySQL. The current version at the time of writing was 3.1.2. Once downloaded, unpack the compressed file. I chose to place its contents in the following folder:

C:inetpubwwwrootphpmyadmin

Once you've done that, fire up the IIS Manager and expand the folder tree until you locate "phpmyadmin", which should appear under "sites". Right-click on the phpmyadmin folder and select "Convert to Application" from the pop-up menu. Take the default settings and click on OK, and you should see the phpMyAdmin icon change from a folder icon to an application icon. If you haven't already done it, create a Sessions folder in your PHP folder, navigate to that folder, right-click on it and select Properties from the pop-up menu. Click on the Security tab, then on the Edit... button, and then add the following users, giving each one full control: