A customer of mine wants to use phpMyAdmin to create some charts whilst working with a complex database. I recommended a trial with phpMyAdmin and its chart functionality. Unfortunately, this did not always work out as expected:
You may e.g. create an ordered resultset first – with a suitable SELECT and ORDER clause – e.g. to get two columns – an index “i” and associatd values “val”. Rows of the resultset ordered e.g. ASC with the “i”-values. But after using the columns “i” a simple line graph the order on the x-axis may appear different than requested by your ORDER clause.
I have posted this as an issue to the (nice) developers of phpmyadmin – who are working on it :-).
There is a workaround. But what I found more interesting is the cause of the problem, which appears on MariaDB and NOT on MySQL. It has apparently to do with a different handling and interpretation of SQL standards for ORDER clauses in sub-SELECTs! See:
https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/why-is-order-by-in-a-from-subquery-ignored/
This is of general interest for developers using MySQL or MariaDB-databases. I, myself, was not aware of it. Besides an already different handling of database replication, I regard this point as one more indication for a growing “distance” between both RDBM-systems…
If you stumble across the phpmyadmin-chart problem, see a discussion and a workaround on the following site:
https://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin/issues/14239
I also want to explicitly thank M. Jayaratne who supplied me with the valuable information referenced above.