Understanding the goals of the tracking system
Each software application has its own idea of what changes are important to track for its users. This section describes tracking systems that exist in other applications, and compares them to the one offered by phpMyAdmin.
Tracking in other software applications
Having access to historic data that displays all of the changes made to an information system is a feature that is taken for granted in many software products. The "undo" feature of any serious word-processing software is an example of being able to go back in time, albeit one step at the time. A more complex example would be the history feature of MediaWiki (the core software of Wikipedia). It enables us to go back to any state of a given page, to see the changes between any two versions, and even to mark any older version as the current one. Tracking information includes the author (or IP address), the date and time of change, and a comment.
In MySQL itself, the logging system (binlog...
