Overview
This article is an overview of what phpMyAdmin is and how to use it at DreamHost.
Background
phpMyAdmin is software that allows you to use a web browser to manage your database. This makes it easy to perform common operations such as managing databases, tables, columns, relations, indexes, users, permissions, etc. You can also run any SQL statement within this interface.
Prerequisites
Before you use phpMyAdmin at DreamHost, you must complete the following steps:
- Add a domain as Fully Hosted or Mirrored on the Manage Websites page.
- Add a MySQL hostname on the MySQL Databases page.
- Allow enough time after adding both the hostname and full hosting for DNS to propagate.
Once you complete these steps, phpMyAdmin will be available on your domain.
Using phpMyAdmin
DreamHost provides phpMyAdmin for customers on shared, VPS, DreamPress, and Dedicated Server hosting plans.
Accessing phpMyAdmin
You have two options to access:
- Use the correct hostname for your database shown in the panel (mysql.example.com)
- Use the official phpMyAdmin hostname of your data center. This will be one of the following:
- West Coast: https://west1-phpmyadmin.dreamhost.com
- East Coast: https://east1-phpmyadmin.dreamhost.com
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You can confirm which hostname to use by checking where your MySQL services are located on the Data Center page. It's either West Coast or East Coast.
Logging into your database
See this article to learn more about how to locate your database credentials and log into phpMyAdmin.
Managing your database
Dropping or deleting a database
If you need to drop or delete a database, you must do so on the MySQL Databases page. phpMyAdmin cannot be used to perform this action.
Optimizing a database
Over time, the size of the database reported by phpMyAdmin will start to differ from the actual size of the database on your MySQL server's disk. This occurs because phpMyAdmin shows the database size using the database's indexes, which can be smaller than the actual disk usage after many read-write cycles.
One possible way to resolve this issue is to optimize your database, although this isn't guaranteed. The following are two methods that you can use to optimize your database: