Relations were temporarily made by the
applications to generate meaningful results. In other words, the relations were in
our head.
This was considered a shortcoming of MySQL by phpMyAdmin developers and
users, and so the team started to build an infrastructure to support relations. The
infrastructure evolved to support a growing array of special features. We can
describe this infrastructure as metadata (data about data).
phpMyAdmin 2.2.0 already had the bookmarks feature (being able to recall
frequently used queries, as described in Chapter 14), and version 2.3.0 generalized
the metadata system. Subsequent versions built on this facility, for example the
2.5.x family with its MIME-based transformations (as described in Chapter 16)
and the 2.10.x family with a graphical relation builder called Designer, described
in this chapter.
The Relational System
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InnoDB
A new MySQL storage engine (InnoDB) became available during
phpMyAdmin's development. The InnoDB sub-system has its own web page at
http://www.innodb.com.
Because the InnoDB sub-system must be made active by a system administrator,
it may not be available on every MySQL server. Here are the benefits of using the
InnoDB storage engine for a table:
It supports referential integrity based on foreign keys, which are the
keys in a foreign (or reference) table.
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