I’ve switched my owncloud solution over from a turnkey image to a self built server on fedora, but that’s another story. In doing so I’ve gone deeper down the rabbit hole with php and mysql, or to be honest, mariadb this time. That being said, I’ve always had this predisposed position concerning GUI’s, as if they will hinder my skill set and hold me back. But as someone coming into sql/db for the first time, it’s absolutely relieving to have it. If you haven’t played with it yet, ( I imagine I’m stating the obvious here) let me introduce, WEBMIN http://www.webmin.com/
In order to get webmin up and running it takes so few steps it feels like cheating. Here the assumption is made that httpdaemon is up and running
wget http://<whatever the hell it is right now, at the time of writing we're at 1.801.1> dnf install webmin-1.801-1.noarch.rpm
Ok, great, now just open port 10000 and navigate to you’re server via ip:10000 or fqdn:10000 (yes, seriously thats it)
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=10000/tcp firewall-cmd --reload
Now that’s all great and all, but what is this? Well, as mentioned I’m a mysql/mariadb noob. The magic is in the task you can perform through this portal. Mysql is foreign to me. putting a ; at the end of every command makes sense for config files sure, but not in bash!
Lets take a look at some of the mysql crap I had to type in to get this site itself up and running…
CREATE USER #######@###### IDENTIFIED BY "PASSWORD"; CREATE DATABASE ##########; GRANT ALL ON #########.* TO ########@#######; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Doesn’t look too bad in retrospect, however I’m a linux guy, I’m not definitely not a “database” guy. That word alone makes me think of falling asleep under the gentle hum of an overhead projector back in high school. Give me a database utilizing chown and chmod for assigning databases to users and I’ll be perfectly comfortable and maybe won’t fall asleep.
Moving on, I discovered this in researching my owncloud migration, and created the needed databases using a… *gasp* GUI.
A picture is worth a thousand words

I’ll leave it at that. you get the idea. If you have to work with a database and don’t have time to learn the syntax, this is a must have.