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Analyzing table structure

Analyzing table structure

From the course: Learning phpMyAdmin

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Analyzing table structure

- When designing a database, it's important to use the correct data type for each column. Once you've started adding records to your database, you can use phpMyAdmin to analyse table structure. Let's do that with the cars table in the upandrunning database. So select cars, and then the Structure, and below the table structure is a series of links. The one we're interested in is this one, propose table structure, click that, and phpMyAdmin runs a select query on the table that analyses it's structure. The results table is quite wide, so I need to hide the panel on the left by clicking that left arrow up there, and what we're interested in is this last column here, Optimal_fieldtype. Now at first glance this appears to be totally unhelpful, because for every single column it's recommended ENUM. That's because this particular table has only a small number of records. You're likely to get different results for a table with hundreds or thousands of records. Still, even for a table with…

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