Question

I have a web portal, consisting of various projects, based on MySQL database. The project administrators need to administrate their tables. I would like to provide them some already existing, free, simple interface with as cheap setup as possible (like 10-15 minutes max of my time per each new project – IMPORTANT! The number of project administrators and their requests grows…). It should support:

• required: table export, import, insert new row, modify existing rows
• not needed, but a plus: foreign keys replaced with some other field value from the foreign table (usualy a “dictionary”), display only certain columns, etc.

The problem is that it is a hosting environment, so I have no superuser permissions to the MySQL database. I don’t have the grant permission so I must ask my hosting provider to run every grant command, so I want to minimize these requests as it is an above-standard service (it’s their grace to me). And these requests would have to be done quite often.

What database administration tools/solutions can I use?

My ideas:

1) MySQL ODBC connector + MS Access as a client. The MS Access would connect via ODBC connector to the MySQL server. I can prepare small MS Access file that would contain a link to desired tables, and also quickly generated forms!

• This is cool, however, I would need to contact my provider every time to create db user with desired permissions… to prevent users from changing table structure or destroying other tables…

2) Client -> Proxy -> MySQL server. Like in 1), but with some proxy. I’m now theorizing, but the Access could also use other protocol (e.g. HTTP) to connect some proxy that would handle the permissions and this proxy would then pass it to MySQL server. Does there exist something like that?

3) PHPMyADMIN. The problem from point 1) remains. However, the permission checking could be theoretically implemented on the PHP level here, so no need to change any MySQL permissions! Is PHPMyADMIN capable of that, out of the box? Can I simply configure a new user which can only see table A & B and only modify column C, etc.?

• However, the import is not much user friendly (no XLS, only CSV, no delimiter autodetection etc.), as well as inserting new records…

4) There are plenty of modern web tools with spreadsheet-like look like GoogleDocs. Could these be used for the task. Again, in theory the permission checking could be done at the web-server (not database) layer… and set up easily… (?)

I’m sure many people had to solve the same issue, so I’m looking forward your experiences and ideas!

Answer 1

My final solution was a deal with a hosting provider – I asked him to create 5 dummy database users for future usage and also asked him to grant me the GRANT OPTION privilege. So I can configure privileges of those users, without having to ask the hosting provider! I did’n know of this possibility at the time of asking.

And then, I use MS Access with MySQL ODBC Connector as a front-end to the MySQL database. Great1!