How do I remove pma tables from mysql without affecting other tables

Question

I have a problem with my phpMyAdmin installation. I accidentally clicked something that creates the pma tables used by phpMyAdmin. (Probably advance features).

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I have some Questions:

1. Does this affect other tables?
2. What is the use of this table?
3. How can I completely disable advanced features in phpMyAdmin and so remove these pma tables?

Answer 1

phpMyAdmin offers to create these tables for you to store configuration information for advanced functionality of the program. The tables are optional. Usually they're put in the 'phpmyadmin' database, but in the event that you don't have permission to create a new database the tables can be put in the database to which you do have access. Based on your comments, that seems to be what happened here.

You can remove them through any of the usual means to remove a table — either from each table itself go to the Operations tab and click the "Delete the table (DROP)" link, or go to the database Structure tab, select the ones that start with 'pma__', and pick 'Drop' from the "With selected:" dropdown box.

There's a chance that you'll run in to an error caused by it trying to write to the history table after you've removed that one, in that case logging out and logging back in should clear the error for you.

To answer your other questions:

Does this affect other tables?

No, the operation of each table is rather independent of each other.

What is the use of this table?

Various phpMyAdmin features like a graphical table relation editor, query history and bookmarks, and user preferences.

How can I completely disable advanced features in phpMyAdmin and so remove these pma tables?

Simply remove the tables. To completely remove any warning about the missing tables, you can edit the config.inc.php file to add $cfg['PmaNoRelation_DisableWarning'] = true; and to disable the possibility of automatically creating these add $cfg['ZeroConf'] = false;