At the First Click

Charly's Column – Adminer

Article from Issue 222/2019
Author(s):

Sys admin columnist Charly freely admits that he doesn't like SQL and phpMyAdmin any more than he does COBOL. Instead, meet his new best friend; the slim, attractive database tool known as Adminer.

When I was young and AIX 4 was in its infancy, we had a full-time database administrator at the data center who could not only recite the whole SQL command set forwards, but could also type it backwards. Behind his back, the trainees called him GRANT [1] father. Fortunately, I didn't inherit his job, because on my popularity scale, SQL ranks at about the same level as COBOL – I learned both once, and I try hard not to use either.

But unlike Cobol, SQL often sticks to the sole of my shoe like a piece of old chewing gum. So, I was looking for a tool that makes the most common SQL operations easier for me and isn't called phpMyAdmin, because I don't like that much either. I hit the bullseye with the tool I found: Adminder [2]! To my mind, this tool gets just about everything right.

First, there is the size. The variant with more than 40 languages gets by with about 470KB. If I limit myself to German or English for the program interface, this drops to hardly more than 300KB. The next surprise: I didn't have to unpack anything, because Adminer consists of a single PHP file. I copied it to a management server on the internal LAN. Adminer users need to go through LDAP authentication just once. Its maker, Jakub Vrána, does not recommend installing the tool directly on the database server.

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