Doing More with phpMyAdmin (Part 2) - Bookmark Bandit (
Page 5 of 7 )
Just as most
browsers allow users to
bookmark favorite Web sites, phpMyAdmin
allows developers to bookmark complex queries, so that they can be easily reused
over and over again. As an example, consider the following query, which returns
a list of customers along with the services that they have opted for:
SELECT clients.cname, services.sname
FROM branches, clients, branches_services, services
WHERE branches.bid = branches_services.bid
AND clients.cid = branches.cid
AND branches_services.sid = services.sid
This query can easily be bookmarked by popping open the
Query window (bottom left of the application) and entering the
query above into the query box. Once a result set appears, simply scroll to the
bottom of the results page, enter a name for the bookmark, and click the
Bookmark
this SQL-Query button to save the query to the bookmarks file.
When you need to execute the query again, use the
SQL tab
to obtain a drop-down list of all previously-bookmarked queries. Find the query
you bookmarked earlier, select it and
Bob's
your uncle! You can also use variables in such bookmarked queries.
For example, if you want to specify the
sid of the service in the
query on a per-instance basis, simply alter the query string to look like this:
SELECT clients.cname, services.sname
FROM branches, clients, branches_services, services
WHERE branches.bid = branches_services.bid
AND clients.cid = branches.cid
AND branches_services.sid = services.sid /*
AND services.sid = [VARIABLE] */
Now, run the query. The first time around, phpMyAdmin will ignore
the condition between the "/*" and "*/" comment marks and run the query after
discounting that section of the query string. No matter; when the result set
appears, bookmark this query and then use the
SQL tab to run it
again. This time, you'll be asked for a value for the
sid variable,
as
seen here.
While this is a good feature, be warned that it is still
a little buggy: I could not use it with string variables correctly and, while it
certainly offers a great way to store complex queries for reuse, it still needs
some tweaking.
