Dear all,
This is Pranavan. Few weeks before I started examining phpMyAdmin code and I found and opened few bugs in issue tracker forum. Also I have contributed in two bug fixes as well. This time I come up with a new feature which I feel, would be a really helpful feature to the frequent phpMyAdmin users who use phpMyAdmin for their all querying needs.
Earlier I thought there is no way to record the query history in phpMyAdmin and then after a good amount of surfing, I found and got to know about pma_history relation residing under phpMyAdmin database.
But still I feel it's not much user friendly because whenever we want to know what queries we issued recently and to re-execute the same queries(for select queries), we always want to go to this particular pma_history table, copy the query and then comeback to the place where we are working, paste and execute which is little troublesome for the user. I myself found it difficult many times to do this continuously. A research by Mark Sanderson and Susan Dumais on"Examining Repetition in User Search Behavior" found that 33% of user queries were repetitions of queries previously issued by the same user. This not only applicable for web surfing but also for database querying required in other applications as well.
Therefore it's better to have an easy way to access the history of the past queries and further having a way to directly re-execute an already executed select query. I suggest to have an additional tab in table level and DB level GUI of phpMyAdmin by clicking which user will be able to view and further re-execute (if he/she needs to) a past query again easily(If it is possible).
I have already started working on this feature and this mail is to discuss whether what I feel is feasible and to get suggestions from you all. Please support and suggest me any ideas related to this.
Thanks and Best Regards, S.Pranavan Third year Computer Engineering, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.