This tutorial explains how you can manage multiple MySQL servers from one phpMyAdmin installation. For security reasons, communication between phpMyAdmin and any remote MySQL server is using SSL encryption (this is not necessary for a local MySQL server since communication between phpMyAdmin and MySQL is not leaving the server).

MySQL GUI Tools is a suite of graphical desktop applications for working with and administering MySQL servers. The suite consists of three tools: MySQL Query Browser, MySQL Administrator, and MySQL Migration Assistant (available only on Windows). We'll look at the first two to see how well they let us manage MySQL without using the command line.

MySQL is a relational database management system. It provides a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL is the most popular open source database, and is the database component of the LAMP software stack. LAMP consists of the Apache web server, MySQL and PHP, the essential building blocks to run a general purpose web server.

You might know that beginning with MySQL 5.1.24, support for the NDBCLUSTER storage engine was removed from the standard MySQL server binaries built by MySQL. Therefore, here I'm using MySQL Cluster edition instead of MySQL Community edition.

To solve MySQL problems or to optimize MySQL server you need to use special tool called mytop. It is a UNIX top command clone for MySQL server. It updates every few seconds, so you can get a reasonable look at your SQL performance. It is capable of displaying a huge amount of information.

MySQL Admin Cookbook is a new book from Packt that helps users tackle real-world challenges with MySQL configuration and administration through 99 great recipes. Written by Daniel Schneller and Udo Schwedt, this book walks readers through the basic and advanced aspects of MySQL administration.

According to What's New in MySQL 5.6, MySQL 5.6 will bring some performance improvements over MySQL 5.5. If you want to test out MySQL 5.6, you have to install one of the development releases from the MySQL downloads page because there is no stable release yet. This tutorial explains how to install the MySQL 5.6.8rc1 (Linux Generic) development release on an Ubuntu 12.10 server.

Percona Server is a drop-in replacement for MySQL. It offers more performance and scalability than the default MySQL server coming with your Linux distribution, while it uses the same init scripts and command line tools which makes it easy to use. This tutorial explains how to install Percona Server 5.5 on Ubuntu 12.10.

Thanks to a number of well-designed tools, MySQL simply is a very easy database to "talk to," a convenience which is particularly important because developers often are tasked not only with constructing very complex schemas and queries, but also with monitoring overall server health and performance.