If you are using windows (with XAMPP) to develop your MySQL applications, you might currently be using phpMyAdmin for your DBA tasks. The phpMyAdmin package is an awesome tool and is a must have, however due to the fact that it runs under Apache and PHP – it can be tricky to use when dealing with big database dumps or other heavy processing.

At this stage, you may decide that the best thing to do is to hit the command line. That’s fair enough if you don’t mind using command line applications. If however you fancy keeping it GUI, then I can highly recommend using the free community edition of SQLyog.

This open source community edition is a free version of their main Enterprise Edition software which is paid for. If you are doing a lot of DBA work then you may want to consider supporting this company by handing over some cash for the fully featured software. The enterprise edition can handle external as well as local MySQL database administration, using SSH, SSL or HTTP/HTTPS tunnelling. It features all kinds of GUI functionality for building your database schema and designing queries. For the serious DBA’s out there it may well be worth a look.

For the occasional big DB import / export session on the local windows host though, the community edition does seem to suffice.

You can download both the community and the enterprise edition here:

http://www.webyog.com/en/downloads.php

To compare functionalty check out this page:

http://www.webyog.com/en/sqlyog_feature_matrix.php

If you have read through this blog, you will realise that I am a big fan of the cURL library for PHP. Also, when using windows to code – I like to use the XAMPP package to give me easy access to an Apache, PHP and MySQL stack.

So here is my quick guide to getting XAMPP to work with cURL. Its really easy:

1. Navigate to your root XAMPP folder

2. Search for all files and folder with this search query: php*.ini

3. Open up all of the files in your favourite windows text editor (try notepad++)

4. Do a find and replace: Find ;extension=php_curl.dll and replace with extension=php_curl.dll (you are just removing the semi colon). Make sure you select to replace in all opened documents

5. File -> Save All Documents

6. Restart Apache using the XAMPP control panel

Thats it – enjoy using cURL.

Related Blogs

http://www.vladimirated.com/web-development-how-to-enable-curl-on-xampp-for-win32

http://www.tildemark.com/programming/php/enable-curl-with-xampp-on-windows-xp.html

http://www.menyhart.net/blog/developer-stuff/enabling-curl-on-xampp/

http://incoherentbabble.com/2007/04/21/using-curl-in-xampp/

http://gabrieljones.com/getting-curl-to-work-in-xampp/

http://rovani.net/weblog/?p=19